KitchenAid Artisan Series 5-Qt. Stand Mixer with Pouring Shield – Imperial Black Import To Shop ×Product customization General

An awesome and serious kitchen toolThis is a great mixer. You should probably own one. Not sure? Read on!Before we bought this mixer, I thought of residential model kitchen stand mixers in terms of my mother’s Oster Kitchen Center or my grandmother’s 

Sunbeam 2371 MixMaster Stand Mixer, White

 (but about 60 years older, with yellowed plastic…) Think: two beaters, a bowl that turns based on beater friction, basically a hand mixer on a stand of some sort, in concept if not design.When you think of the KitchenAid, you should think of a large restaurant/commercial Hobart mixer down-sized to fit on your counter. It works exactly the same way – and it’s an awesome thing.Pros:- Powerful. You can put cold butter or refrigerated cookie dough in this and begin mixing it immediately. The motor is very powerful, and I have seen almost nothing that it can’t get through. Kneading very stiff dough even works here – sometimes you might hear the motor strain a little, but I’ve never run into something that it simply couldn’t get through.- Mixing attachments. This unit comes with a mixing paddle (the attachment that I use most often), a whisk (next most often) and a dough hook. I use all three – in that order of frequency.- Accessories. I don’t own any of the accessories, but there are some great ones out there. On my list of accessories that I will get someday are: the pasta attachment – 

KitchenAid KPRA Pasta Roller Attachment for Stand Mixers

, and the pasta extruder – 

KitchenAid KPEXTA Stand-Mixer Pasta-Extruder Attachment

. There are others that I’m less sure would get lots of use in my kitchen, but they might in yours! These include the “attachment pack” for meat grinding and vegetable slicing – 

KitchenAid FPPA Mixer Attachment Pack for Stand Mixers

, the grain mill – 

KitchenAid KGM Stand-Mixer Grain-Mill Attachment

 and others. Even an ice cream maker 

KitchenAid KICA0WH Ice Cream Maker Attachment

 which I admit I’ll consider if my Cuisinart ice cream maker ever truly dies.- Tilting head. I really like this feature, since the bowl is securely attached to the mixer base, and you just rotate the head up and out of the way. It keeps the beater over the bowl and lets anything needed drip back into the bowl, reducing mess somewhat.- Orbital action. This is great, since one mixing implement orbits around the bowl giving full coverage and leaving no places “unmixed” for you to discover later in the recipe.- Variable speed. You can vary the speed from very slow to “time to clean the spatters off of the ceiling”As with any tool, I can think of a few cons as well:- The head rotates on a metal pin. This is a good design feature since you can slide the pin out to remove the mixing head when necessary, though it’s never been necessary for me in the 8 years I’ve owned the device. The problem is that the motion and vibration of the mixer, at least for my unit, causes this pin to “self-remove” and invoke the unit’s self-disassembly “feature”. The solution, however, was ridiculously simple – I just wrapped a single wrap of electrical tape around that part of the mixer neck, and the pin has stayed put for years now. Black electrical tape on my black mixer is nearly invisible and nobody has ever questioned or commented on it.- “Walking dough.” When using the dough hook and kneading even a moderately-sized dough, the dough tends to “walk up” the dough hook and instead of reaching the wide neck and falling back into the bowl, it keeps walking up and around the hook, sometimes getting up to the mixer head, resulting in discarded greasy dough. If I keep the batch size relatively modest and spray the hook with non-stick spray before kneading, I can usually get it to work just fine, but it’s not as fool-proof as mixing with the paddle.- Cleaning. The bowl is simple – it’s stainless steel, and you can wash it by hand or stick it in the dishwasher. The mixing implements, however, should be washed by hand. Hand washing isn’t hard, and they’ll come out great and last forever. If you put them in the dishwasher, however, the metal (maybe it’s aluminum?) will degrade and tarnish with the harsh detergents used in the dishwasher. This will result in a grey powdery substance forming on them, which could get into your food if not carefully cleaned after the dishwasher. And the substance is ugly. So avoid any problems, and hand-wash always!On balance, I think you should just go buy this mixer. If you don’t want this one, you should be looking at more expensive models.Stepping up the Kitchen Aid line, you can move to a mixer with a stationary head and a bowl lift to lift the bowl into the mixing position like this: 

KitchenAid KP26M1PSL Professional 600 Series 6-Quart Stand Mixer, Silver

 or this: 

KitchenAid KV25GOXBU Professional 5 Plus 5-Quart Bowl Lift Stand Mixer, Cobalt Blue

For those looking for even cooler appliances, you might consider this big boy: 

Viking Professional 7 -quart Stand Mixer, Black

 or maybe this: 

Cuisinart SM-70 7-Quart 12-Speed Stand Mixer, White

 but I must state I’ve never used either tool.HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Love The Mixer – WhiteI love the Artisan Series 5-Qt. Stand Mixer white it is a forever mixer. It fits nicely on my countertop and leaves space for preparing food. I turned it on soon as I got it everything works just as expected no issues. I looked at the mini stand mixer at the store I liked it. It is solid and well made but I decided the larger 5-Qt was better for me. I do Not like that I had to buy the beater with the side scrapers separately. I also bought the glass bowl which was expensive separately. It would really be nice if they offered standard options of selecting the type of bowl and beaters you want to include with your mixer at the time of the purchase being how expensive the mixer is. I already have a red kitchen aid professional lift mixer for over 12 years still works like new looks like new easy to clean and maintain it is very powerful. It is a dream to have two different styles of the kitchenAid mixers. I like to cook and bake cakes, pies etc for lots of family and friends get togethers. They are the perfect mixers as far as I am concerned. I would also gift one to someone dear and special to me.

Not what they used to be.Kitchenaid has definitely cut corners recently. They are sadly not what they were for many years. I had to scrub the Stainless Steel bowl literally ten times with baking soda and lemon, then finally Barkeeper’s Friend three times before all the silver residue came out of the new bowl, and i still wonder what i will be consuming. The bowls are now made in India and I assume a final acid wash is now not being used. Also, the mixer had lubricant/oil all over the mixer and safety stickers placed crooked. It was a PROJECT just to be ready to use it. Why they would put their customers through this is beyond me. Seems like a great way to kill a successful company. Also, the spring that used to be on the spindle thingy is now gone. The paddle moves around more than it used to. I bought one in 2005 and it was a completely different experience. I was stupid to sell that one, but I got into different color schemes for my kitchen and got rid of it. My conclusion is that unless you’re ready to work for your mixer to be ready to use, it may serve you to try a different brand. If the cool attachments that Kitchenaid offers for this mixer is worth it to you, then, by all means, get one but be ready to sweat for it. This is yet another American company cutting corners yet charging the same and riding on reputation alone. This saddens me. Attached are pictures of the bowl being cleaned. The powder in the photos is baking soda that I repeatedly used to get the gunk out of it. Barkeeper’s Friend would be a better cleaning option I believe. Good Luck!

Side by side comparison older Classic vs new ArtisanI use my Kitchenaid for the usual batters as well as for kneading bread dough and for running attachments like the grain mill. My 4.5 qt Classic was purchased in the early 1990s (K45SS) and powers through anything, but the bowl size often seems too small for some recipes. I thought about upgrading to the professional lift-type Kitchenaid until I read the trouble people had with them overheating and shutting down, and that the lift-type was introduced after Whirlpool bought the brand. Since I have several attachments that run off the Kitchenaid, I did not want to switch brands and looked at the larger bowl and higher “flour power” of the more traditional Artisan tilt-head. The Artisan has 325 watts vs. the Classis at 250, but this is just a marketing gimmick and does not really say anything about the power of the appliance.After running these two machines side-by-side, I learned two things: the capacity of the larger bowl (5 qt vs 4.5 qt) was offset by the new dough hook design, and the new motor struggles and heats up much more than my older motor.I made a batch of sourdough, part whole grain but still fairly soft, using a recipe for two small loaves (though I have regularly kneaded larger batches in my machine). The Artisan motor sounded so labored I did not run it long. Especially puzzling was how the dough climbed up the dough hook. Now I have had that happen before, but generally only if I have overfilled the bowl capacity, but this was not the case. So I transferred the dough still in the 5 qt bowl and the 5 qt sized dough hook to my Classic, and while the motor did not labor, the dough went straight up the hook again. Odd. Then I moved the dough to my old 4.5 qt bowl with its hook and had no problem kneading it with the Classic as it did not climb. I moved this bowl and hook combination to the Artisan and the bread did not climb the hook there either, but the motor was running hot. I concluded that the new shape of the hook was causing problems – too close to the bowl sides perhaps.To test the overheating problem, the next day I put my grain mill attachment on the Artisan and ground wheat for 5 minutes. The motor was feeling pretty hot to the touch. I moved the attachment to the Classic and ground the same amount of grain in 3 minutes that the Artisan took to grind in 5, but I continued to grind grain for the full five minutes. My machine was just warm to the touch. So my thought is that the newer motors are not as robust.My research of KitchenAids on the internet revealed that there is a *very* simple way to tune the speed of the mixer and since my Classic was jumping to a fast speed at “Stir” I tried this out (turning two screws at the back – there are instructions to be found on You-Tube) until the beater rotated 15 times in 15 seconds. Lo and behold, I now have a soft start and no more flour flying all over the counter when I turn on the mixer! O happy day! Next thing I will do is re-grease the gearbox and then I think I will continue to have my little workhorse for another 20 years or so. I just have to work within the constraints of the bowl size. Or not, considering it never stopped my Kitchenaid before!My advice is to find an older model at garage sales or on ebay or buy one off a friend who never uses theirs. Sometimes, older IS better.

KitchenAid Delivers and Amazon exceeded my expectationsThis mixer truly does live up to it’s reputation. It is well made and works like a dream. I loved the clover leaf roll recipe in the included recipe book…As for the color, the options are there if you want to pay more, but if plain old white is good enough for Paula Deen, Giada Delaurentis and Ina Garten, then I’d say I’m in good company because white will never go out of style…it’s a classic mixer color and this mixer is so well made it will probably outlast the many kitchen decorating fads bound to change in the years to come.I have wanted one of these mixers for several years, but couldn’t justify the purchase until my tired old Sunbeam broke. I can tell you that the quality and workmanship is there and I am thrilled with this powerful, sturdy mixer. For home use, I don’t think you could ask for anything more. I was considering a larger one that I saw at a warehouse retailer for $60.00 more, but it was so tall that it wouldn’t fit on the counter under my cabinets. After using this workhorse of a mixer, I’m convinced that it is absolutely the perfect size for my needs… I don’t know if I would ever want a larger mixer because this thing has confidently handled large batches of everything that I wanted to make for my large family without skipping a beat and without hogging tons of counter space.As for Amazon, their service was exemplary. I opted for their free Super Saver shipping and still had my new mixer within 2 days of placing my order. I can really get behind a company that under-promises and over- delivers. I haven’t seen a deal like Amazon offers on this model anywhere and I have looked for a long time. The nearest thing would be a refurbished model and it was still more expensive and that was before the rebate!! I don’t know how they can offer this deal, but I’m thankful that they did. In any case, although it sounds too good to be true, this definitely is the real thing. If you are looking for a KitchenAid, snap this one up before they come to their senses and raise the price!!!