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If there’s a Rolls-Royce hood ornament of the modern kitchen, it’s the KitchenAid stand mixer. I recently raved about the Artisan that I’ve had and been using these past four years to bake delicious sourdoughs, snickerdoodles, and caramel turtle brownies.
These don’t go on sale often, and they’re sure not cheap. Reliably, though, every year around Black Friday KitchenAid drops the prices on these by a bundle. When you take 22 percent off something that normally costs $450, you save a big chunk of change.
Having kept mostly the same form since it was designed in 1937, the gorgeous Art Deco KitchenAid is beauty, brains, and brawn. It’s like a pageant winner who can talk your ear off about highbrow Russian literature and then change the timing belt on your car’s engine.
I’ve mixed up all manner of doughs and batters, and nothing yet has been too tough for the mixer. Some fetishize the pricer Professional model, but the Artisan’s 325 watt motor has powered through even particularly thick, dry recipes of sourdough and Irish brown bread.
Beyond mixing up doughs and batters in its 5.5 qt. dishwasher-safe, stainless steel bowl—the perfect size for most standard recipes, I’ve found—you can add from a long list of official attachments to make ice cream, juice fruits, create homemade pasta, and more.
The tilt-head mechanism makes removing the bowl and swapping any of the three included attachments—whisk, flat beater, and dough hook—as quick as tying your shoe. It’s quicker and easier than the Professional’s bowl-lift mechanism.
You’ve got your choice of 39 colors for the Artisan, from classic whites and grayscale colors to pastels such as Mineral Water Blue to raging, vivid colors such as my favorite, Empire Red (pictured).
Given the reputation that KitchenAid mixers have built up among satisfied amateur cooks, professional chefs, and industry reviewers, you can expect one to last for years and years of heavy use, a nice change from the light-duty, disposable world we seem to live in.
