McNelis.biz

If you’ve been reading this site long enough, you know that my wife and I love to cook. When we were working on our wedding registry she knew that she wanted a bad ass KitchenAid stand mixer. But not just any mixer, she wanted the KitchenAid Pro 6qt stand mixer. So thats what we registered for, and thats what her mother got us.

We’ve now had the mixer for several months, and really, its been quite under-used. Of course, this is much more a result of lack of space to keep the mixer permanently set up, than it is a testament to its abilities. Chris has used the mixer for the occasional project, but surprisingly, it has been me that has made the most use of it. How could this be, you may ask yourself. Well, bread.

Its kind of ironic, I don’t really even enjoy eating bread much, save for when it is on a sandwich. I’ve never really eaten garlic bread, never done the bread and butter thing with dinner; none of it. So it was with some trepidation that I started my baking journey. I’ve blogged about bread before, and my earliest adventures in making it. It started with the Honey Wheat bread, then went to white bread, jalapeno cheese bread, cinnamon raison bread, and most recently, on Sunday, French bread.

Through all this bread making there was one thing that I managed to avoid, the actual physical work of kneading the dough. Now I know that many bakers will say that kneading the dough is the most relaxing part of baking bread, and they are probably right. After all, bread isn’t particularly relaxing for me to make, but it is particularly simple. All it takes is time and patience. For example, the french bread I made (which Chris liked a lot), was just flour, water, and yeast. The difficult part was letting it rise long enough (probably my fault due to the amount of yeast I used…I could find our scale until after the dough was made). At any rate, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with the bread were it not for the stand mixer.

And that brings me back to the beginning; the mixer. Its proved more than capable. In fact, for what I’ve used it for so far it is overkill. But the fact remains that the motor is incredibly strong and even when the dough has gotten to its rubbery-est (I know, not a word), it never faltered. That, coupled with the easy to use lever for raising and lowering the bowl, simple mixer attachment, and large bowl, make it a pleasure to use. We’ve got a couple of attachments for it as well…but haven’t gotten around to using them, but once we do I’ll elaborate on our experiences with those at that time. Until then, happy baking.