Thermomix TM7 review: what £1,349 buys a working mum in Leeds

The first Thermomix I ever saw was in my friend Nicola's front room in Horsforth, next to a bowl of crisps and three bottles of prosecco. The advisor made a mango sorbet in about a minute, then a loaf of bread dough, then a risotto while talking to us the whole time. Eleven women clapped. Nobody bought one. £1,349 does that to a room.

What I carried home, along with a recipe card, was a question. I'd seen it cook. What I didn't know was whether it could take anything off a Tuesday. Tea in our house is for four: me, my partner Lee and our lads, Kai, 12, and Freddie, 9. I'm in the office in town three days a week, and on those days tea begins the second my coat comes off and has to land before someone starts on the bread out of protest.

So I booked my own demo, bought one, and cooked with the Thermomix TM7 for 40 days. 47 recipes, a running list in the notes app and a stopwatch on my phone.

You can't pick one up at Currys

If you've never met one: picture a jug blender sitting on a hotplate, with digital scales in the base. It can chop, knead, simmer, stir and steam, one after the other, in the same steel jug. The recipe runs on the screen one step at a time, weighing each ingredient as it goes in and then doing the cooking with the blade turning slowly so nothing catches.

There's no shelf to take it from. Vorwerk sells it in Britain through self-employed advisors, the kind who ran Nicola's evening, and through its own website. Go through an advisor and you get the demo, and a person to text when your dough sulks. That route was £1,349 when I bought, and the website price was a touch higher.

If you know the TM6, this is what's different:

• A bigger screen: 10 inches, up from about 7, and the knob has gone. You tap everything.
• Lid-off simmering: reductions can bubble uncovered, and lifting the lid halts the blade instantly.
• More steaming room: the Varoma basket on top is noticeably larger.
• A cooler jug: it's insulated, so the outside doesn't scald you mid-soup.
• Less racket on the slow and middle speeds.

What you're buying

It fits under the wall cupboards, but it's deep and heavy, so it isn't something you put away. It took the corner by the hob on day one, and the slow cooker went up in the loft.

My first week: three wins and a pan of paste

The first few nights I stuck to what the lads already eat: spag bol, leek and potato soup, then a tray of bread rolls. No complaints, and the soup beat my own recipe, which I'll deny if anyone asks. The scales are the thing you fall for. The screen asks for 30 g of butter, you drop a lump in, and the number climbs to 30 while you watch. No jug, no weighing bowl, nothing extra in the sink.

Then came day four and the mash. The recipe said to use the butterfly whisk. I was rushing, the whisk was in the dishwasher, and I thought "it's only mash". I used the blade. What came out was a shiny, stretchy, grey-white paste you could hang wallpaper with. Freddie poked it with a fork, watched it pull up in a string and said "it's like the school canteen stuff but stickier". Lee ate his. Lee eats everything.

Minutes at the hob, before and after

Time was the whole point, so I counted it. The fortnight before the Thermomix came, I made our normal teas the normal way and wrote down only the minutes I couldn't walk away: peeling, chopping, stirring, hovering. The fortnight after, I made the same sort of teas in the TM7 and wrote down the same thing. Lee insisted on adding "witnessed, L." at the bottom of the list, mostly to be annoying.

Tea wasn't ready much sooner. Soup is soup, it needs its half hour whoever's in charge. The change was in how much of that half hour belonged to me. On an office day, that's the gap between getting tea done and getting tea done and hearing Freddie's spellings.

My favourite move was cooking in layers. The rice sits in the little basket inside the jug, and above it, in the Varoma, go the chicken breasts and the broccoli, and they're all ready at the same beep. The larger Varoma took four breasts, a whole head of broccoli and a fistful of green beans, with space left over.

"Tea isn't any quicker. I'm just not the one standing over it. And that's what I'd hand over the money for." Tracey, day 26

Stirring jobs: where it earns its keep

Anything you normally stand and stir, it takes off your hands. Custard from scratch, with eggs, milk and a vanilla pod, came out silky every time and never caught on the bottom. My nan made custard like that on Sundays and I've always used powder. Not any more.

Risotto came out creamy without me stirring for 25 minutes. White sauce for lasagne took two minutes of my time. Bread dough was kneaded in two minutes flat and rose beautifully on the windowsill. Porridge on school mornings cooked while I made packed lunches, with no pan to soak.

Noise through a party wall

Our kitchen backs onto Maureen's next door, with one brick wall between us, so I was listening for trouble from the start. Everything was measured at 1 metre, in a kitchen that reads about 36 dB when it's quiet, which in our house is a rare reading.

• Slow stirring: 43 dB, less than the fridge hum.
• Kneading: 60 dB, a steady dull thud.
• Soup at top speed: 78 dB.
• Sugar to icing sugar: 82 dB. Freddie clamped his hands over his ears.

Day to day it's a quiet machine, because day to day it's mostly stirring and simmering. Ask it to smash up something hard and that changes fast. The only complaint came the day I ground almonds at half nine at night. Maureen asked over the fence the next morning whether we'd "had a man in with a drill". These days anything noisy gets done at teatime, when the lads drown it out.

Four things in the "could do better" column

A few moans went on my list more than once. These are the ones worth knowing before you spend this much.

Browning mince. The browning setting reaches roughly 160°C. A single onion, fine. Half a kilo of mince for a family spag bol, no: it sat in its own juices and went grey. From then on the mince went in the frying pan first and into the jug after. It's one pan, not the end of the world, but it's still a pan to wash.

Feeding growing lads. 2.2 litres is a comfortable tea for four adults. It isn't a comfortable tea for two lads who eat like they're training for something. A curry for four left nothing for Lee's lunch the next day, and a double batch means two rounds.

The yearly fee. The step-by-step recipes come from Cookidoo, which costs about £50 a year once the three free months run out. You can run it by hand, setting time, heat and speed yourself, and a few recipes are stored on the machine. But the step-by-step bit is what you're really buying, so put the fee in your sums.

The closed lid. There's no hole in the lid to glance through or pour stock into while it's going. Stop, lift, look, carry on. By week two I'd stopped noticing.

Washing up

I was braced for a machine that gives you twenty minutes back and then steals them at the sink. It didn't. Jug, lid, blade and the Varoma set go straight in the dishwasher, and the base is one smooth surface with nowhere for drips to hide, so a damp cloth sorts it.

Between recipes there's a quick pre-clean: water, a drop of washing-up liquid, 30 seconds of spinning, and the jug's ready for the next thing. It's noisy, about 74 dB on my meter. After bread dough I still pull the blade out and wash it by hand, because dough creeps underneath it.

I kept a tally. With the TM7, washing up averaged 4 minutes a meal. The old way, with a pan, a pot and a chopping board on the go, it was 12. I hadn't expected the sink to be where I noticed it most.

What a TM7 tea really costs

Nobody at the demo did this sum, so I did it on the back of a school letter. £1,349 for the machine. About £50 a year for Cookidoo after the free three months. Over five years that comes to roughly £1,585, or about £317 a year.

During the test, the TM7 made 4.9 teas a week on average. Keep that up for five years and it's about 1,270 teas, so roughly £1.25 a tea for the machine and the recipes together. Lower than I'd feared. But that number depends on it being used most nights. Bring it out for the odd soup and it's the most expensive soup in Leeds.

Vorwerk offers interest-free instalments at the time of writing, with a deposit up front. If you wouldn't buy it outright, spreading the cost won't make it a better idea.

Is it for your kitchen?

Alternatives worth a look

For plenty of households the real rival is already in the cupboards: a slow cooker, a food processor and a stick blender. Between them they'll make most of what the TM7 makes, for a fraction of the money. You'd miss the screen that talks you through it, the scales in the base and having everything happen in one jug.

Tempted but put off by the price? A second-hand TM6 from a seller you trust works with the same Cookidoo recipes and has the same size jug, for a lot less. You'd go without the big screen, the larger Varoma and lid-off simmering.

And if what you're really after is crispy things on plates by six, a big two-drawer air fryer could fix more of that for a fraction of the price. Our Ninja Foodi MAX Dual Zone review runs the same family teas through one. If it's your morning coffee you want to sort out rather than your tea, there's our De'Longhi Magnifica Evo review. Every score we've given is together in our reviews, and how we test shows where the numbers come from.

After 40 days, would I pay for it myself?

I would, and I did, but it's about where I am in life right now. Office three days a week, two lads with hollow legs and a partner who pulls his weight as long as someone gives him instructions. Something that weighs, stirs and steams while I fill in a school trip form is worth a lot in our house.

Ten years ago, when Sunday cooking with the radio on was my idea of a nice afternoon, I'd have said don't bother. It won't make you a better cook. What it does is keep going at six o'clock when you've got nothing left. Nicola, by the way, has now booked a demo of her own. She wants to see the mash for herself.

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