On trial: Bosch Series 6 Intelligent Sensing Integrated Scale Stand Mixer

A good stand mixer can elevate your baking and do the hard work for you – but a great stand mixer will also remove the risk of over or undermixing to find the exact moment your dough, batter, cream or egg whites reach their optimum combination for your recipe. Enter, the Bosch Series 6, my reliable new kitchen buddy.

The Bosch Series 6 Intelligent Sensing Integrated Scale Stand Mixer is, yes, intelligent and it’s also good-looking, which matters when it’s taking up real estate in an already crowded kitchen. I’d always made do with a handheld whisk for cakes and meringues but you have to pay attention to avoid overmixing, periodically pause to scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula and, crucially, hold it – meaning you only have one hand free to add more ingredients (and I can’t break an egg one-handed). Frustrating.

In short, electrical hand whisks are great for some jobs but needy. And they can’t make bread or pasta dough, or great pastry. So if you’re looking for a new stand mixer, why not get one that comes with a 10-year warranty and thinks for itself with sensor technology that’s unique to the market?

Don’t be alarmed by talk of sensors and programmes – the Bosch Series 6 stand mixer is easy to use. If reading instructions isn’t your thing, Bosch has helpful short videos which I watched before even switching the mixer on. But basically, I plug in and switch on the stand mixer at the wall, scroll through the options on the LED display until I reach integrated scales, choose g/ml or lb/fl oz, then weigh everything either into the big mixing bowl or – if you’ve something that needs to be added later, eg sieved flour to butter, sugar and eggs – you can weigh ingredients separately on top of the mixer arm. Next, I choose one of the sensor-driven automatic programmes or go manual.

To make pizza dough I follow one of the Bosch recipes in the free Home Connect app, weigh all of my ingredients into the mixing bowl, then scroll on the LED display until I get to the sensor-driven programmes. Select ‘yeast dough and sourdough’, hit OK, confirm I’ve attached the correct tool (dough hook) and have put the protective lid on (though, honestly, it comes away spotless – this isn’t a messy mixer at all thanks to that 3D planetary movement),then turn the wheel on the right to the ‘snail’ icon, and boom, it starts making my pizza dough.

However you use the Bosch Series 6, the 3D planetary mixing means every bit of the bowl is covered by the tool, there’s no scraping down the sides by you, no pockets of unmixed flour, it’s really very clever and efficient. It’s also tidy – the 5.5l bowl is slightly smaller compared with most other stand mixers on the market, but because of its mixing action being so efficient, you can still make a whopping 3.5kg of cake, should you need to! Or about 2.5kg of bread dough. That’s a lot of baguettes.

Sensors in the mixer constantly check the texture of your mixture, adjusting the speed when  necessary, stopping at just the right moment…and on the pastry dough programme, for example, mimics the kneading action of your hands, times how long the dough needs to prove, then tells you when it’s had enough and is ready for you to roll – now that’s a game-changer, as I can never judge whether something proved for long enough (how can you tell if something has doubled in size if it’s in a bowl with a narrow bottom and a wide top anyway?).

Yes, and if you don’t want to use the preset cake programme, you can go with manual and the sensors in the mixer will still ‘watch’ your cake batter to make sure it’s mixed to perfection.

When you’re baking a cake in two or more tins, it’s easy to place each one on the stand mixer in turn to weigh out exactly half of the batter. My big-bottomed Victoria sponges are a thing of the past.

It’s not silent, obviously, but you can still hold a conversation while this is running. As the base has been designed to be so steady, the mixer doesn’t rock or judder at all, even when running at its highest speed.

Yes. It’s sleek, smart and the stuff of my home-baking dreams. I can finally make cake batters, meringue or even just whipped cream hands-free, and I don’t even have to concentrate. This stand mixer is a superior judge of when to stop kneading a pasta or bread dough, instead of just frowning and poking and worrying, like I used to. And sweet pastry is a thousand times better now the bulk of the work is done in the Bosch Series 6, with my hot hands are only required for a quick knead before wrapping, chilling and rolling. Bring on the pies.

★★★★