Ask Evan: What Stand Mixer Do You Recommend?

Every week I answer a question from a Good Food listener. You can email me a question to goodfood@kcrw.com, leave one on Facebook or add one in the comments section here. This week’s came from Ronny:

I’m thinking of treating myself to a stand mixer to start baking different kinds of breads other than no knead and I was wondering if you all have a favorite brand or if there’s anything I should watch out for like wattage and quart size.

I don’t think there are any more passionate internet forums than those devoted to exactly this subject. There are fans for every major brand: KitchenAid, Breville, Electrolux DLX etc etc etc. My experience is with the KitchenAid K5. It’s the stand mixer I’ve used for the past 30 years. Not the same one though. Any home stand mixer, used enough will come to the end of its life. I’ve gone through 4 or 5 of them over the years at Angeli where we had a 60 qt Hobart for pizza dough, a 20qt Hobart for large quantity batters and doughs, but it’s the KitchenAid K5 that was used constantly all day long. As soon as one person’s hands were off it, someone else grabbed it. That said, it’s not perfect. You have to watch out for flying flour when it first starts up and scraping the bowl becomes a very familiar task. Also a quick and dirty non scientific query of Twitter followers shows a majority prefer the KitchenAid. That said, get the biggest wattage, bowl, horsepower combo you can afford.