Finally Bought the KitchenAid Artisan - Loving It!

I finally bought a KitchenAid mixer. I’d wanted one for a long time, but I hated to spend so much for a small kitchen appliance. I write about food and cooking and was struggling with my Black & Decker hand mixer. It’s a great hand mixer, but it’s not a stand mixer. When I tried to make bread for the holidays and wound the dough up to the hand mixer base (making bread is not recommended by Black & Decker or other hand mixer companies), I made up my mind to get a stand mixer. My grandmother had used a KitchenAid as far back as I could remember (the same one), so I began comparing and price checking.

The KitchenAid Artisan sounded perfect. The bowl is five quarts. That’s a good sized bowl. I can’t think of anything I’d make that would call for a bigger bowl. KitchenAid does make bigger models, but I think very few home cooks would need more power and size than the KitchenAid Artisan.

The Artisan comes with three attachments. There’s a basic whisk like on most hand mixers, a thicker style beater for bigger jobs, and a bread hook for making bread without having it ball up the stems and to the head of the blender. There are other attachments that can be purchased like for making pasta or ice cream. The attachments are real easy to take on and off and lock in safely too.

The other piece that comes with the KitchenAid Artisan is a pouring guide. It’s a plastic piece that rests on the side of the metal bowl. You can pour ingredients in as the mixing is running without making a mess. That’s the idea anyway. I make more of a mess with the guide than without it.

The motor is 325 watts, and it is powerful. I put wheat bread ingredients in the bowl, turned on the mixer, and it just mixed right up beautifully. In fact, the mixer is so powerful, you only need to mix about half the time listed for hand blenders. It also has 10 speeds, so you can adjust for any job.

As I mentioned, my Grandma had a KitchenAid mixer (which my greedy cousin most likely has now). Grandma’s best cake was an applesauce cake. This does not sound like a hard cake to make, but she loaded hers with chunky homemade applesauce, raisins and nuts. The batter was super thick and basically impossible to mix with a hand mixer. The KitchenAid blends up the ingredients with no problems.

With this heavy duty mixing, I can also say that the KitchenAid Artisan is also easy to clean. It’s mostly metal and wipes clean. The attachments snap off as I mentioned, and those are also easy to clean.

The down side with the KitchenAid mixer is that it is heavy. I guess it has to be to handle big mixing jobs. The weight is around 30 pounds, so it’s nice if it can live out on the counter. It’s pretty, so that’s no problem. I got the red one and just love it. They make all kinds of colors, so I’m sure anyone could find a color to match their kitchen.

I used a hand mixer for years, so it’s not critical to have a nice stand mixer like the KitchenAid. It is nice though. I use my hand mixer for smaller jobs and the KitchenAid for the big jobs. It makes life much easier when mixing thick batters (like cookie dough), big cakes (great for pound cake – adds the extra air needed) and for bread. The KitchenAid Artisan is also terrific when mixing big batches of foods. It takes quite a while and a lot of work to use a hand mixer to mix up a big bowl of stuff, but you just turn on the KitchenAid, and it does the work.