Kitchen

[gardenman]

Best Buy is having a Black Friday sale now (10:39 AM/ET on 10/29/20) on the 5 qt 450 watt Pro today at a very good price ($300 off their regular price.) I just ordered one and it'll be delivered tomorrow. I'll test it out on Saturday on a bread of some sort. My old Kitchenaid is about 40 years old and not in the best of shape, so an upgrade is in order.

[Patriot3]

I just checked it out and they have colors, too!  Quite a buy!

[gardenman]

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@Patriot3 wrote:

I just checked it out and they have colors, too!  Quite a buy!

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Yeah, I was impressed. I got the blue one. My old Kitchenaid gets used every week and the back motor cover broke a while back and flops around. The cord is a bit looser back there than it should be. A piece of cardboard electrical insulation fell out from back there somewhere. The original beater is losing the plastic coating. It was time for an upgrade.

Both Best Buy and Target are having Black Friday sales apparently starting today, which is kind of weird as it's not Black Friday, or any Friday for that matter, but they're good sales. I was debating replacing my 55" HDTV with the 65" $249 one at Best Buy when I saw the mixer and decided I needed it more than the HDTV.

[aroc3435]

@gardenman   Congratulations on treating yourself to a new Kitchen Aid 5 quart Pro mixer.  That is a very good price.

Happy testing with what I'm sure will be some lovely bread when it arrives!

aroc3435

Washington, DC 

[SouthernBee]

@gardenman : Sam's club now sold out at my club but DH purchased the black for me yesterday.

[Ibby114]

I inherited an older Vitamix that was being tossed at work- I love it! But I can tell why it was on it's way out, my kitchen lights flicker a bit when I use it so the mechanics are probably not as efficiient as newer models. I'll be checking black friday deals for a new one- I hope not to spend the $400-500 they that usually cost!

[gardenman]

The mixer came yesterday morning around 10:30 in the morning and got it's first test this morning. It's a very pretty mixer. The good news is the new spiral dough hook is much more effective than the straight one on my old mixer. It blended the dough very quickly and kneaded it very well. My old Kitchenaid was a 325-watt one and this one is either 450 (online description when I bought it) or 525 watts (what the label on the mixer says).

The Italian bread dough I made uses seven cups of flour and my old mixer handled it pretty easily on every speed. The new mixer, on speed two with the dough hook, seemed to struggle with it a bit more. The motor would speed up and slow down and seemed a bit stressed. Now, is that due to the different dough hook design? The mixer that supposedly is more powerful is really less powerful? It needs breaking in? I don't know. I was largely expecting it to handle this dough quite easily. It did handle it, it just sounded like it was working a lot harder than my older mixer did. It got the job done though. 

An odd thing I noticed on this mixer is that the flat paddle beater has a hole about an inch or so down from the top. I guess that's an air hole to prevent a vacuum from forming to make removing the paddle beater easier. It goes right into the center of the beater where the shaft fits, so that's my best guess. (I never had a problem removing the old beater on my old mixer though.) The manual says nothing about it. I thought maybe it was for some weird attachment of some sort, but I can't find anything saying why it's there. My old mixer had no such hole on the beater or the dough hook. If you're making a big batch of cookie dough or cake batter that gets up to the hole, that hole could be a bit of a pain to clean. It might be handy to keep a few pipe cleaners lying around.

I won't be making more bread for a few weeks. I already have a loaf of pain ordinaire Careme in the freezer from last week and a loaf of Italian bread will join that later today giving me a couple of weeks of bread in the freezer. Bernard Clayton's pain ordinaire Careme is my go-to recipe and that'll be a good test for the new mixer as you beat the starting batter/dough for ten minutes using a paddle beater then knead for an additional ten minutes. A full twenty-minute workout with a fairly large dough will be a good test for the mixer. It'll probably be just before or just after Thanksgiving before I give it that test though.

It got the job done today. I was expecting it to breeze through this recipe and it seemed to struggle a bit. The new dough hook is more efficient, but also might strain the motor a bit more. I'll likely make a batch of chocolate chip cookies up next (maybe this coming week or next?) and that'll be its next test.

I've got to end this now as the first rise of the Italian bread dough is just finishing so it's time to go and punch it down.

[Bridgegal]

I hope I can ask a KA question here.  I read somewhere that KA make s 2 types of stand mixers.  One where the bowl sits on the bottom and the 'head' raises up and one where the bowl is held by little arms and that one is better than the other.

Any input on this?  Thanks.

[SouthernBee]

@Bridgegal : I have owned both. Sometimes the bowl that sits on the bottom would get really tight and DH had to grip the handle to turn it loose for me. He just purchased the Pro- bowl lift for me. I have read the instructions and watched several YouTube videos but so far unable to get the bowl positioned correctly. I have a friend that has this mixer and she will be visiting with in the next couple of weeks and hope she can help me.

[sunshine45]

as much as i would LOVE a new color, i already own two......one that is avocado green that is from about 1960 AND one from 1989 in white. i cannot kill either one of them, they are that good.