Kitchen Aid Mixers

I started doing a lot of cooking at home to try and be healthier in what I am eating. This change in lifestyle put quite a bit of stress on the old Oster and Sunbeam mixers I inherited from my grandmother and mother, respectively, and I was soon stuck with two machined that were not up to the wear and tear I was now putting them through.

Knowing that I intended to put a new machine through some heavy duty punishment, I made a list of some of the things I planned to use it for. One of my criteria was that I planned to make a lot of homemade bread dough, and that requires a mixer than can stand up under the strain of making some types of bread doughs and pizza crusts.

Being a fan of the Food Network, I began to take notice of the brand of mixer that many of the featured chef stars use on their programs. I figured that the mixers they used also got a great deal of wear, so they would choose something that would stand up to constant use for more than thin cake batters. Time after time I noticed that the preferred brand was the Kitchen Aid Mixer. None was more distinctive than the 5-quart model with flames on it, decorated like a beloved race car used by Alton Brown on his Good Eats program.

With a tacit recommendation like that, I went back and did some further research on the Kitchen Aid brand. I was pleased to find that the 5-quart and the larger 6-quart models had more than enough oomph to handle the kind of wear and tear I was likely to put it through. Despite some past problems reported with some 5-quart models that had plastic gears, Kitchen Aid corrected the problem by returning to all metal gears. In addition, the mixer has a wide range of attachments that can be purchased for the Kitchen Aid which includes such things as a pasta maker, meat grinder, ice cream maker and vegetable slicer. It is available in a wide range of designer colors and there are even stickers that can be purchased to personalize the Kitchen Aid (although I was never able to tell if Alton’s mixer was painted or had decals, I must admit I was tempted to look for something similar).

Although slightly more pricey at first, the Kitchen Aid mixer looks as though it will hold up better under hard use than other brands, especially the slightly larger 6-quart model. In addition to holding more batter or dough because the bowl is larger, customer reviews that I found were almost consistently positive. The mixer has become a very welcome addition to my kitchen, and as I save my pennies, I plan to add a number of different attachments which, in the long run, allow me to divest myself of other kitchen appliances taking up precious counter space.