The ultimate kitchen appliance, available everywhere but here

KitchenAid is getting into the market for the best appliance you've never heard of.

The Thermomix is a food processor/blender that also has a heating element and a scale. Sounds crazy, I know, like one of those weird things you see advertised on television: "It's a car buffer, and it's also a Doberman pinscher!"

In fact, it's amazing. It consolidates multiple kitchen jobs into a single countertop appliance, saving space, and it also renders a lot of tedious kitchen tasks as easy as pressing a few buttons, from caramelizing onions to making bechamel. I've had one for a few years now, and if I was allowed to have only one electric kitchen gadget, I'd pick this.

Right now, there are only two players in this market: Vorwerk, which makes the Thermomix, and Kenwood, which makes a stand-mixer-based cooking machine called the Cooking Chef. Other companies have tried to make their own version of the Thermomix, but they seem to have made little inroads. KitchenAid is the first major American brand to get in on the action, with all the market muscle and advertising power that this implies. At the International Home and Housewares Show, it offered a snazzy-looking appliance that could give Thermomix a run for its money. But the company may not even offer it in the U.S. In that, they'd be following Vorwerk's lead - to get mine, I had to order it from Canada.

The American market has proved tough to crack for these amazing, and amazingly expensive, machines. Thermomix pulled out awhile back, amid scuttlebutt that it couldn't sell enough product. The Cooking Chef, available at Williams-Sonoma, doesn't seem to have lit the market on fire, either. I've heard little about KitchenAid's Cooking Chef equivalent, a Williams-Sonoma-exclusive multicooker with an optional stir arm that retails for about $450 together.

These machines are all the rage in Australia and Europe, especially Spain - nations with less disposable income than ours. After talking with a KitchenAid rep, I came to a few conclusions about why the machines aren't on American counters.

First, they're expensive: Combining multiple appliances into one, and having all the parts do an excellent job, costs more than it would to build three separate appliances. Because they're so novel, consumers often have a hard time imagining what they would do with it.

Too, you must do more than simply tweak your recipes to get the most use from a Thermomix. A good Thermomix recipe breaks recipes down quite specifically: one minute at Speed 3 at 90 degrees Celsius, add this, chop at Speed 7 for 30 seconds, change the temperature, cook at Speed 1 for 20 minutes. This sounds ponderous, but it's a lot less fiddly and time-consuming than, say, dicing all your vegetables to the correct size and then stirring for 20 minutes. Average active cooking time for a Thermomix recipe is well under five minutes, even for complicated, multi-step dishes.

The machines need specialized cookbooks and a user base that generates new versions of favorite local recipes. Think about Crock-Pots: If the only recipes you had were the ones that came in the company-written cookbooks, they wouldn't be all that appealing.

Without that installed base, you need to do a lot of consumer education. That's why Thermomix is sold entirely through authorized reps who do in-home demonstrations - the high-tech version of a Tupperware party. The ideal venue for these appliances would be an infomercial or someplace like QVC, which has a longtime partnership with KitchenAid and moves many of its products. But the price point is wrong: The demographic watching infomercials doesn't drop $1,000 on a kitchen gadget.

All this doesn't answer the question of why Vorwerk failed in the first place. I don't know for sure, but I can make some educated guesses.

First, American cuisine doesn't rely heavily on things that benefit from a lot of stirring, like cream sauces - especially in the waistline-conscious demographic that might be ready to buy these machines.

Second, Americans in general cook less than people in other countries. When people average an hour or more a day preparing the main meal, an appliance that halves that time will have more mass-market appeal than in a place where preparations average 30 minutes.

Third, American countertops are more spacious than just about anywhere else so one of the main benefits, compressing many appliances into one, isn't quite so valuable.

The good news is that the value proposition may be getting more valuable as the Great Inversion moves more affluent Americans into cities. There, they will confront their tiny kitchens and maybe be open to the idea of putting one of these darlings on their countertop.

And KitchenAid's cooking machines may do some of the educational work needed to convince people of their benefits. In addition to the stirring multicooker, KitchenAid is bringing out a little multicooker that can be attached to your KitchenAid mixer, giving you a pretty good Cooking Chef imitation on the cheap (plus a multicooker that you can use on your countertop without the mixer).

If either of these catches on, Americans will start to understand the value of having an appliance that stirs and cooks simultaneously and develop recipes for it. Maybe then we'll be a ready market for Thermomix and its brethren.