Review: Ankarsrum Assistent Original

Out of the blue a few months back, my power-baker friend Shannon texted photos of a failed baking project. Instead of a picture of a plateful of crumbly cookies, she sent three successive shots of the stripped gears in her high-end stand mixer, which was in the process of falling apart.

“Do I just bite the bullet and shell out $3K for the Hobart n50,” she asked, referring to a pro model that looks like it could power a tiny tractor through a stony field, “which at that price, should rub your feet and tell you that you're beautiful?”

I sent Shannon's pictures to another power-baker friend, Tara, as something of a joke, à la “look at the weird stuff people send me!” Instead, she had a suggestion.

“Tell her to get the Ankarsrum.”

“The what now?”

“The Ankarsrum. It's from Sweden.”

As a product reviewer, it's always a bit of a thrill to say, “I've never heard of such a thing,” knowing it's preapproved by someone who knows what's what in the kitchen.

I looked it up, and this unique Swedish gem—the $700 Ankarsrum Assistent—which originally came out in 1940, did not disappoint.

Here in the United States, where the brand of reference is KitchenAid, we're used to stand mixers whose motor and moving parts are all above the bowl and whose primary attachments—the dough hook, paddle, and whisk—all spin around in the bowl.

In the Ank, as aficionados call it, the main bowl spins, powered by a motor in the base of the machine. Once I started testing it, I'd tell friends about it, usually accompanied by a short video I took, which would invariably elicit a response along the lines of “what the hell is that?”

The Ank's motor is controlled by a pair of dials: One is for the speed, and the other is an on/off switch that also allows it to run on a timer for up to 12 minutes, something that's handy when you want to multitask, but not overmix. The metal bowl is a cavernous seven quarts, and the company’s website touts its ability to make five kilos of dough (11 pounds!) at a time. In the machine's back corner is a tower with an arm that swings out over the bowl and attaches to a kneading dough roller.

In what you might call its classic setup, the dough roller is attached to the arm, and a dough knife slots into the tower to keep the sidewalls clean.

Turn it on and your dough comes together, the bowl spinning, the roller squooshing it up against the sidewall, the dough knife keeping that sidewall clean. There's also the possibility of using a big dough hook in place of the roller, which I did to gently (and cleanly) mix together a giant batch of meatballs. Confusingly, there's a second bowl that's stationary for other baking styles. This smaller, plastic bowl in the shape of a bundt pan has a pair of balloon whisks for light work and thicker wired “cookie whisks” for chunkier doughs.

I went with classic breads to start testing, making sure to adjust recipes to add liquids first—something of an Ank requirement—immediately marveling at all the work done by friction. Yes, the bowl spins thanks to the motor, but the roller rolls thanks to a grooved rubber ring around its top that nestles into the bowl's lip. The dough knife is naturally pushed against the sidewall of the bowl. It quickly gives you the pleasing sense that there's less to break.

Once the dough comes together, you can pivot the arm and roller toward the center of the bowl as it runs, allowing you to adjust the kneading pressure on the dough, occasionally allowing you to work through the step in the directions where you stop to scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Staying in a similar, bready vein, I made toast bread, following a recipe in the book that came with the mixer and makes four squat loaves that fill a half-sheet pan. I used up some lovely Moroccan olives to make a more rustic loaf. I also tried two different recipes for focaccia, and one that many people recommended I make: challah. For each of these, the Ank felt impressive and sure on its feet.

I showed my little video of it to Seattle baker Evan Andres, co-owner of Columbia City Bakery, and he cocked his head trying to take it in.

“What the hell?” he said, quickly followed by, “Can you bring it in?”

Columbia City Bakery is a top-level Seattle bakery with croissants that could easily hold their own in Paris, and the kitchen has a beautiful utility to it. There are speed racks everywhere, and a four-level Bongard deck oven the size of a Chevy Suburban. We set up the Ankarsrum next to its industrial homologue, an ABS spiral mixer with one motor for the spiral hook, another to turn the rotating base, and a cage to keep you from accidentally falling into it.

“Maybe compared to the KitchenAid, there's one less gear to strip,” Andres said.

I'd learn later that he was on to something. While a company PR rep told me the inner workings of the Ankarsrum are proprietary, I found a photo of its incredibly simple belt drive on the website of a Nevada kitchen product retailer. Pleasingly, there's the motor, the spindle below the bowl, and the belt that connects the two.

At the bakery, the “hydration” of different doughs comes up almost immediately. Low-hydration doughs like sandwich bread have relatively less water in them, while high-hydration doughs like a rustic loaf have more.

“Every mixer has a sweet spot,” Andres said, using his hands with little bird-like jabs to test the dough as the Ank worked. “There's a nice feeling that your hands won't get crushed in there by a dough hook.”

Switching to his sourdough dough, Andres moved the dough knife and roller arm around like he was working the levers on a backhoe, clearing off the sides and bottom of the bowl.

“These adjustments don't exist with a KitchenAid,” he noted, adding that he liked how he could set the time switch and leave the machine to do its thing without worrying about overworking the dough. At first, his sense of the Ank's sweet spot was high-hydration dough, but the bigger sweet spot is bread.

“For bread at home, I'd buy this over a KitchenAid,” he said.

I should quickly note that a) that's impressive and b) he's not down on KitchenAids at all. He uses several in the bakery and even took a moment to praise his KitchenAid Commercial mixers.

Around the time we were going to take a look at the whisks and plastic beater bowl, bakery co-owner and pastry chef Marlena Zatloukal, who'd been keeping tabs on what we were talking about, made her own proclamation.

“It's made for this,” she said, placing her hand on the metal bowl, “but the plastic bowl is to get it over the hump.”

And if you look at it that way—like you're a bread baker who occasionally likes to make cake and cookies—the plastic bowl works just fine. I brought it home from the bakery and made some buckwheat crêpe dough, whipped egg whites into stiff peaks for lemon meringue, and later pulled together the batter for Dorie Greenspan's bewitching miso-maple loaf cake. (You should try making that recipe no matter which mixer you have.) Finally, I made a good-sized batch of chocolate chip cookies from Cook's Illustrated's hallowed The Best Recipe cookbook, opting for the extra-thick coconut and almond variation, and the cookie whisks plowed right through, no problem.

I really enjoyed getting to know the Ankarsrum, but I did have some hang-ups, some personal, others not, and still others not its fault. First off, this should not be anyone's first mixer. Recipes in the United States are written for KitchenAid-style stand mixers, and you end up having to adapt on the fly, something made a little more perilous with baking, where precision is more important than in other realms of cookery. I constantly found myself trying to figure out which attachments would work best, and when a recipe and a machine are both new to you, who knows? A little note in the cookbook that comes in the box with the Ank reads, “Dough roller or dough hook? It's a matter of opinion and taste. Try both and see what you prefer.” I'm sorry but screw that. This machine's been around for 80 years, and I'd rather have a little chart with accumulated wisdom than flail around on my own; I can learn to freestyle once I've owned it for a couple of years.

All that said, if you're a committed home baker and want a machine that does a fantastic job of mixing and kneading bread, no gears stripped, this is your baby. For the kneaders among you, the Ank does far more than get you over the hump; it might just be the last mixer you ever buy.