I often hear people say, “I love cooking the traditional way, so a Thermomix® isn’t really for me.”
And every time, I smile – because nothing could be further from the truth!
Owning a Thermomix® doesn’t mean giving up tradition. It doesn’t replace your instincts, your experience, or the recipes you’ve grown up with. In fact, it does the opposite. It supports traditional cooking beautifully and makes it easier to keep cooking from scratch, even when life gets busy.
Traditional cooking has never been about rejecting tools, it’s about respecting ingredients, understanding technique and taking pride in the process. Our grandparents embraced the best tools available to them at the time, whether it was a pasta machine, a pressure cooker or a wood-fired oven. The Thermomix® simply belongs to that same story: you are still the cook and it is there to assist you as the perfect sous-chef.
What many people don’t realise is just how valuable the Thermomix® is for food preparation alone. It helps with all those everyday steps that are essential to traditional cooking but take time: chopping, grinding, milling, kneading, mixing, making sauces, stocks, pestos and many other pantry staples. You can then move straight to your stovetop, oven, barbecue or even a slow cooker, exactly as you always have. The Thermomix® doesn’t take over your kitchen – it fits perfectly into it.
Of course, it can also cook complete meals on its own, and do it exceptionally well. From soups and risottos to sauces, custards and long, gentle cooks, it follows proper cooking principles with precision and consistency. This is why it’s such a help with batch cooking and meal prep, and why it’s also used by many professional chefs as a sous chef rather than a replacement. It quietly does the work while you stay in control.
As an Italian, this conversation is especially close to my heart. In Italy, the Thermomix® is known as Bimby, and it has been part of Italian households for over sixty years, right from the very beginning of Thermomix®. In a country famous for fiercely protecting its food traditions, it has never been seen as something that replaces real cooking. Italian families use it to make ragù, besciamella, doughs, creams and desserts – all the building blocks of traditional Italian cuisine. That alone says a lot.
One of the things I love most is that you don’t need to abandon your own recipes. Almost any traditional recipe can be easily converted into a Thermomix® method. You might use it to prepare a soffritto, knead a dough or gently cook a sauce, and then finish the dish on the stove or in the oven exactly the way you always have. Once you understand the machine, translating traditional techniques becomes second nature.
Through the built-in Cookidoo library, you also get access to thousands of recipes developed and tested in Thermomix® kitchens all over the world. These are not random shortcuts, but carefully tested versions of traditional dishes from many different cultures. I personally love being able to access Italian recipes and cook some of my favourite childhood dishes in my Thermomix TM7, even though I’m so far from home. It feels like bringing a little piece of Italy into my kitchen.
For me, the Thermomix® isn’t about cooking less traditionally: it’s about being able to cook well, from scratch, more often and with less pressure. Tradition and technology don’t exclude each other, and when used thoughtfully they complement each other beautifully. That’s exactly what I see the Thermomix® as: a modern tool that helps keep traditional cooking alive.
Clelia has been a Consultant with Thermomix® for over 6 years. Born and raised in Italy, she has proudly been calling Australia home for the past 20 years.