Verdict

Pros

• Powerful
• Does lots of jobs

Cons

• Bulky to store
• Awkward speed control
• Pricey

What is the Kenwood HDP406WH?

The Kenwood HDP406WH is a pricey hand blender with five attachments. It can blend, whisk, chop, mash and make soup.

It’s a good blender, but there are too many attachments to store and they’re not all necessary.

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Kenwood HDP406WH – Design and features

Hand blenders are a paradox. You want lots of cool attachments so you can save time in the kitchen, but lots of attachments means lots to store. This Kenwood suffers from the latter: the gubbins take up half a kitchen cupboard.

The Triblade name comes from the blending foot, which is stainless steel (more heat- and stain-resistant than plastic) and has three blades: one flat and two that bend upwards. It’s teamed with a 750ml beaker, graduated in millilitres and fluid ounces. It has a rubber, grippy base and a lid but annoyingly no spout.

Next up are a straightforward metal whisk and a good-sized vegetable chopper, big enough to blitz a couple of onions at a time. Again there’s a lid for the container.

Finally there’s a large, flat, plastic blending attachment specifically for soup and a similar-sized attachment for making mash. All the attachments pop off by squeezing two buttons at the bottom of the body.

The blender body is grey, easy-grip rubber at the top and your fingers naturally fall on the power and turbo buttons. There’s no loop at the top for hanging it. There is a dial to adjust power but it’s stiff and tricky to turn with clean hands, let alone when you’re cooking, so you won’t change the speed much.

Kenwood HDP406WH – What’s it like to use?

The chopper is excellent. It blitzed parmesan in an instant and chopped two onions at a time with ease; setting a low speed and just tapping the button four times was a good way to get chopped onions, not mush.

The soup accessory is simply a large, plastic blending attachment too wide to fit in the beaker, so it’s clearly designed to be used in the saucepan. It did a fine job on onion soup but so did the blending attachment. The advantage of plastic is that it won’t scratch a non-stick pan… but that seems to be the only reason for this accessory.

The blender was fine on chickpeas too. The whisk was very good on egg whites. And the masher did a good, efficient job. The results are less like mashing by hand and more like putting potatoes through a ricer. But unless you’re a mash aficionado or you make gnocchi, you just don’t need it. And as mentioned above, changing the Kenwood’s speed is hard because the dial is hard to grip.

Cleaning was generally easy. There are no slits to get bunged up at the bottom of the blending attachment so blitzing some soapy water is all it needs. The masher needs to be unscrewed and thoroughly cleaned though.

Should I buy the Kenwood HDP406WH?

Probably not. If you have heaps of cupboard space so you don’t mind the clutter then it’s a fine product. But we didn’t like the clutter of all the attachments.

If you want a good blender with a fair few attachments then we recommend the Tefal Infiny Force. Or if you have the space and want all mod cons then get the Sage Control Grip All In One, which has a masher and much, much more.

Verdict

A good blender… but you’re paying for attachments you don’t need.

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