February 21, 2019 - 1:08pm
replacing KA 600
Hello everyone!
I have been using KA600 for 8 or so years but as I bake larger breads with high gluten and whole rye flour content, I keep fixing this machine and I am tired of doing so. Yesterday the gears failed again.
What would be the step up? I was thinking about KA Pro Line, but not sure if this is a real upgrade.
PS. all the CAPTCHAs on this site are annoying, had to resolve about 7 to post here.
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And yet we still get a dozen or so spam posts a day. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Once someone makes a legit post about bread or baking here I tag them so the only captcha they have to deal with is the one on the login form.
Welcome to the site.
It's worth looking at the Ankarsrum. Bottom drive, different kneading motion, open top so it's easy to watch what's going on and add ingredients.
Do you want other functions (cakes & other sweet baking, or the various other things a KA can do) also?
If you're completely focused on bread, pizza, and other dough-based baking, KitchenAid is not a smart choice. Just about every multi-function machine has strong points and weak points, and KitchenAid's dough handling is a big weak point. Other machines have a different weakness.
If bread is one (less significant) part of what you plan to do with a mixer, for example you're mainly a cake decorator who makes the occasional loaf of bread, it will be good enough.
I'm not saying it's truly bad; I'm saying it's an inferior choice for those who are only making bread dough.
If you get an Ankarsrum, you will get a mixer that handles doughs from high hydration to dense, heavy bagel and pretzel doughs.
For the more common mixing chores, it does just as well. In the eight plus years I've used mine, I've never run into anything that I expect of a mixer that it can't do. I even use it to blend my fresh roasted coffee beans, using the scraper to turn over the beans. I confess that for mashed potatoes, though it mashes smoothly and quickly enough that they don't get starchy, I prefer my el cheapo hand mixer with contra-rotating whisks - I prefer my mashed potatoes a little lumpy. Different strokes and all that.
gary
Greg, I have read some positive posts on the higher end KA mixers, though my suggestion is to look at Bosch and the Ank, since both are better designed in my opinion for kneading than a KA. I have an older Ank and love it, but have a friend who has the Bosch Universal plus and loves that
I am happy with a single purpose dough mixer. I will likely be able to fix the KA and keep it for the VERY occasional use.
I was looking at the Bosh Universal Plus Stand Mixer. It is inexpensive but I saw some online opinions that it is super hard to keep clean and that is not nearly as powerful as some say. Could you point me to a reliable review that has been written by bread baker?
Admin: that is unfortunate. At one point I run a forum online and spam was a major PITA, but those days antispam tools were much less sophisticated. I am sorry this is still a problem and we are forced to click on dozens of car pictures. One thing to consider: I had much better luck using custom made CAPTCHA, it was just a few lines of code to display simple mathematical challenge.
Hello
Have you considered a small Italian single speed mixer with revolving bowl?
A two speed model would be better, however they almost always require 3phase juice.
There are some cute little maschines with a max dough capacity of say 5kg, they are simple low tech machines, usually well built and would probably be good at mixing 1.5 kg doughs. These maschines are also still light enough to lug around and stash when not in use. Prices here in europe start at around 700€
good luck with your search and happy baking to you
cheers
Daniel
thank you, I ended up getting the ankarsrum because of recommendations on this forum. I am very happy with it so far.
I expect you're "all set" then, because when people are not satisfied with that machine, generally they've had nothing but problems from the start (through either a defective machine or operator error).