"KitchenAid" news and stories

I love my KitchenAid mixer more than is rational or reasonable. Several years ago, a bunch of my friends pooled their money in order to buy it for me and it hasn't left my kitchen counter since it arrived in my apartment. It's an amazingly useful tool. I know other people who are equally attached to their assortment of KitchenAid products.

Knowing just what good tools KitchenAid makes, BakeSpace has teamed up with them during February to give away one appliance a day (that's every day), all month long. If you're interested in entering the contest, the first thing you do is check out the calendar of giveaways, to figure out which prizes you want to try for. You earn the raffle tickets you need to enter by uploading recipes to BakeSpace, or by getting your friends to join the community.

For more details on the contest or to start your BakeSpace profile, click here. Good luck everyone!

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This has got to be one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. I just came across a link to a site that sells flame decals for Kitchen Aid mixers!

The website, FlameKA.com, carries a wide variety of decals that will fit Kitchen Aid classic, the Artisan 4-6 quarts, and the Pro 600. They claim that the decals won't interfere with any attachments. They're also supposed to be easy to apply, long lasting, and great looking. The decals range from $15.95 to $36.95, so they're pretty reasonable also.

I hinted to Santa that I wanted a metallic pink Kitchen Aid with flame decals (I was only joking because I knew it wouldn't happen). The mixer I got was, and still is, awesome and pink. Now I know how to fulfill the rest of my wish.

*Full disclosure: FlameKA.com offers a 10% off coupon for anyone who links to the site. I'm not going to mess around with trying to redeem it, though.

[Via NotMartha]

A blade coffee grinder, which is the standard for most home coffee drinkers, has a food processor-like blade that swings around and chops up coffee beans. The grinders are usually fairly inexpensive and do the job of grinding up beans faster than you could do it with a hammer, but they are not necessarily very efficient, nor do they come close to getting the coffee beans evenly ground. Burr grinders, which are more expensive but crush the beans instead of chopping them up, produce even grounds and will generate the most consistent flavor in coffee - not to mention that they offer a range of sizes (from powdery fine to coarse) that work with different types of coffee makers, including espresso machines and french presses.

The Wall Street Journal's catalog critic sat down and tested a number of burr grinders to see which ones performed the best. The less-than-satisfactory grinders included the Capresso Infinity burr grinder, The Krups Burr Coffee Mill and the Cuisinart Automatic Burr grinder. The top performer was the KitchenAid Proline Grinder ($200), which produced grounds to exacting specifications and stored them in a nice glass container before use to eliminate the possibility of static charge making grounds adhere to the side of the container, as they sometimes did with plastic container models. The model given the "best value" designation was the Solis Maestro Burr Grinder ($115), which performed perfectly, but had a plastic grounds container that could have a minim static charge. In fact, it is the grinder that I use and it always does an excellent job - even with dark-roasted, oily beans that can jam up some other grinders. The KitchenAid would make a great Christmas gift "for coffee geeks," but the Solis is probably the way to go in terms of both price and performance.

Many of us only use a large roasting pan a few times a year and even though the meals we are using it for are holiday dinners, where to is important to try to get the food as perfectly cooked as possible, it is hard to justify spending $200+ dollars on a pan that gets so little use. Cook's Country tested some inexpensive roasting pans, all under $100, to see if they would do just as good a job as the more expensive pans while staying in our budgets.

Each of the pans they tested was designed to work both on the stove-top, so they could be used to brown meats, and in the oven or under the broiler. They chose pans with a minimum size of 15" x 11" inches, to accommodate largest turkeys. Overall, they strongly preferred pans that had sturdy, upright handles, which were easy to grip and did not interfere with the way the pan fit into the oven by adding an extra 2-3 inches to the length. They also found that stainless steel pans with aluminum cores offered the best heat distribution, while plain stainless steel could be a bit spotty when it came to browning. Their top picks were:

• CALPHALON Contemporary Stainless Steel Roasting Pan ($100)
• CUISINART Chef's Classic Roasting Pan ($80)
• KITCHENAID Gourmet Distinctions Roasting Pan ($50) - Best Buy
• GRANITE WARE Oval Roasting Pan ($22) - Best Buy for very infrequent roasters

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Pizza cutters are greatly underappreciated kitchen tools because they don't appear to be all that useful. After all, couldn't you just use a knife to cut through the pizza? With a knife, you run the risk of dragging half the toppings along with each cut, not to mention that you might have to saw through the tougher crust, further disturbing the pie as you struggle with it. The beauty of a good pizza cutter is that it is incredibly quick and efficient. It should cut through thin and deep-dish pizzas with ease, producing perfectly clean slices. To see which brands are the best of the best, let's take a look at a testing of pizza cutters.

The best cutters were deemed to be the OXO Good Grips 4-inch Pizza Wheel for Non-Stick Pans, the KitchenAid Large Pizza Cutter and the Cuisipro Pizza Wheel. All have large wheels that will not get gummed up by extra cheese even in the deepest pizzas and have handles that are comfortable and safe. The cutters are also good for dividing up bread dough (I frequently use my OXO when baking rolls or breadsticks), cutting up sheets of pasta and sectioning those giant chocolate chip cookies that kids sometimes get instead of birthday cakes.

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