On 13 Jan 2008 20:15:45 GMT, Felix Karpfen >
wrote:

>12 months after a KitchenAid mixer finally made it to Australia - now
>available in very upmarket stores - I am now told to avoid it like the
>plague,


Felix, for what it may (or may not) be worth, I have a Kitchen Aid
Artisan and am very happy with it. I've used it to make bread
according to the recipes in the manual that came with the mixer
several times. One is for french bread baguettes and the other is for
a plain white bread. Both have come out well, very consistently.

Otherwise, it does an excellent job of creaming sugar and shortening
for making cookies. It does a wonderful job of making batters for
sweet breads. In short, it does everything it's made to do.

I do NOT use it for making my regular sourdough loaf. I shoot for 600
grams of dough to bake in a 8.5" x 3.5" pan. I bake only for my wife
and myself and that's all we can eat before it gets dry. I think the
batch would be too small for the mixer to accomplish good kneading.
And, I've learned that using a mixer for the quantities of dough I'm
mixing is NOT the best way to go. Hand mix and stretch and fold work
great!

As has been pointed out before, the manual says to cut the quanty of
flour in half if using whole-grain flours. That would get down to
about 3.5 cups - still more than I would use for my standard small
loaf.

In summary, the mixer performs as advertised. It's not advertised to
be able to make large quantities of dough, and trying to do so would
probably result in dissatisfaction. If you want a light-duty, home
mixer, the Kitchen Aids are great. If you want to mix a lot of dough,
something else would probably work better.

Best wishes,
Burney




Burney dot Huff at Mindspring dot com