KitchenAid 7pc Professional Series Cutlery Set Review
The humble wooden knife block has always been a firm favourite on kitchen worktops, but KitchenAid, who offer such knife storage designs themselves, are now inviting fans of their classic die-cast stand mixer to indulge in a premium RRP £429/ $699 matching knife set.
Design
Despite being a kitchen brand that is teetering on being a century old, KitchenAid use their historical stand mixer design to work in their favour. Managing to draw strong and diverse crowds of users, even millennials, to their persuasive and genuinely original retro product styling, the new 7pc Professional Series Knife Set typifies this design statement. It features a blazing choice of colours - raspberry ice, sugar pearl silver, onyx black, frosted pearl white and the shade of ours - candy apple. This bold and juicy colour twinkles in natural sunlight and is the brightest thing on our worktop for sure! Of course, it goes without much saying that the USA made block is weighty and extremely well made.
On the other side of the pond, in Germany, the knives for the set are forged from that country's prided world leading steel. When we first picked up the knives we noted an exemplary level of detail within the design to aid longevity. The most obvious being the triple riveted JewelSteel fibreglass handles - meaning they should ideally outlast the blades. Contrastingly, the stainless steel blades have had attention paid to prolong their usefulness by being ice-tempered to harden them and maximise sharpness.
How good are they in action?
8" Bread Knife: Upon receiving this set from KitchenAid our first quest was to use the bread knife to slice into a newly baked loaf. Freshly baked bread is exceptionally tricky to slice into even sliced pieces at the best of times and unlike our previous bread knife, which only cuts well when the bread has a chance to cool, the KitchenAid offering makes the cutting task controlled and easily achievable.
8" Chef Knife: The weightiest knife in the set is particularly easy to control and this is all thanks to handles that promote grip and ergonomic happiness. Furthermore, chopping raw sweet potatoes, squashes, etc., uses minimal effort on the hands. This knife is also the one to have to hand with the weekend roast, too.
3.5" Paring Knife: Whilst intended for heavy peeling action, which we have explored and conclude it’s good at such tasks, we still believe a dedicated kitchen peeler is the best tool for the job. However, this knife’s seen a lot of action in preparing smaller ingredients like rustling up a quick fruit salad or dashing through cherry tomatoes with ease. To illustrate the degree of control merged with sharpness on offer just have look at how finely thin we can slice a tomato without it splitting.
5.5" Serrated Utility Knife: This knife fills the void between the above two. Serrated for necessary assistance in cutting into delicate pastries like croissants - to save them from being squished - it is also very handy with hard crusted items like bagels, which could be sliced with the 8” Bread Knife but this utility knife makes the job more easily manageable.
Shears: Always useful for some quick garnish on a pasta dish; or you can use them to slice up pizza fairly proficiently.
Diamond sharpener: We haven't felt the need to use the sharpener all that much; which is definitely a good sign! It’s designed not just to reinstate like-new sharpness but also to score away micro-bacteria. Which leads us on to the fact that all these KitchenAid knives are dishwasher safe.
Verdict
A well equipped knife arsenal to cut, peel and chop your way through food preparations. Each knife is perfectly balanced in the hand, providing crisp cuts that require little effort to work against and the ice-tempered blades mean longer lasting razor sharpness. After use, KitchenAid have transferred their iconic stand mixer design ethos into a striking die-cast USA made worktop steel-forged block to store the set in. Buy on Amazon
