I recently got my hands on a Kenwood AT641, a fruit juicer attachment for the Chef/Major series of kitchen machines, and now I’ve had the pleasure of actually using it.
The AT641 is a high-speed, rotational juicer which works by the principle of making a puree of the apples (or whatever else you’re juicing), using a spinning plate with sharp studs on it, and then accelerating the puree against a cone-shaped piece of metal with small slots in it, working somewhat like a sieve. The juice drips down and is collected into a jug, the meaty bits of the apple is sent up and out into a small container for the bits that are thrown away.
It works reasonably well, the apple chute is quite large, so only large apples need to be cut in two, and none of the apples in the bucket I was testing with needed to be cut in more than two, and the apple juice I got out was nice and smooth, yet had some apply bits in it. It’s not clear, but that’s the way I prefer it, you can filter it later if you prefer clear juices. The build quality seems quite good with sturdy metal parts and thick plastics. It’s easy to dismantle once you’ve done it once, as there’s a trick to remove some of the parts.
On the downside, I had problems with it not managing to throw all the residual bits into the garbage container. They stuck to the to plastic above the metal cone and ended up clogging. This might be due to using the wrong kind of apples or something odd like that, but it was nevertheless a bit disappointing. I hope it will work better on my next batch. Cleaning the juicer requires dismantling it completely (which is done without any tools), and is fairly easy, except for some crooks that are hard to clean properly, especially given you can’t inspect them visually.
The whole process was fairly painless, including gathering an overfull bucket of apples, I spent an hour and a half making almost four litres of delicious apple juice.
All in all, I’m reasonably happy with the buy and hope my clogging problems are just a fluke.