| Background: Jen and I enjoy cooking. When we met, we both had a full kitchen. We even had his and her Kitchenaid mixers. When we consolidated, my sister Martha was quite pleased to receive our extra for Christmas. We kept mine because it was the heavy duty beast, which I use on occasion to make bread.
I was quite fond of my Kitchenaid and it got a lot of use. However, it has come to my attention that they simply do not hold up to prolonged heavy use. I have mine repaired once and it is in need of repair again (same problem). Since they aren’t cheap to repair or replace, I did a bit of research. What I found was that lots of people that use their Kitchenaid for making bread have the same problem. So what’s a guy to do? After some research, I discovered the Bosch Universal Kitchen Machine. Unlike the Kitchenaid which can be used to make bread, this baby is designed for it. Surprisingly, it’s actually cheaper (retail) than the Kitchenaid. I found quite a number of very positive reviews from people using them for bread making and then found the biggest problem with them, they’re hard to find! Guess what I got for my birthday? So far I’ve made 5 batches of bread and I’m quite pleased. Like my Jetta, it seems to be a very well engineered German machine. I expect time to prove it’s durability. Tonight I did something my Kitchenaid can only dream of. I mixed four loaves of whole wheat bread at once. The ‘ol Kitchenaid creaked and groaned when mixing just two. Kitchenaid, this is eBay, eBay, Kitchenaid. And what post would be complete without a Kayla photo? |
 
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6 thoughts on “Them Germans”
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What needs to be repaired? How much? Would we need to repair it frequently if we don’t make bread?
The gear assembly is what needs to be replaced, I might take pictures of it next time around. I don’t recall how much it cost, it’s been a couple years. Until mine started misbehaving, I had never heard of a Kitchenaid mixer failing. This second time (it still works, just makes an awful racket while mixing) I did more research and its premature demise seems to nearly always be related to breadmixing. So, while I can’t give a definite answer to your last question, I think you can be reasonably assured that a Kitchenaid mixer will last a lifetime of normal use, if you don’t use the dough hook.
These machines are all “toys” (even the Bosch one) – I wouldn’t trust these to work for long with such a workload (of course, the KA is only really good for bisquits and the like).
The truth is that if you want to bake your own bread (and that’s “real” bread with very heavy dough), there’s only two possibilities:
– do it like they did for millenia: by hand
– buy a professional machine, like the ones here:
http://business.listings.ebay.de/Kleingeraete-Kuechenmaschinen_Ruehr-Knetmaschinen_W0QQfromZR4QQfsooZ1QQfsopZ1QQsacatZ62598QQsocmdZListingItemList
But sinced I’ve had the chance to buy this bread:
http://www.hofpfisterei.de/
during my years near Munich, I didn’t have any urge to bake my own (it wouldn’t taste as good anyway and is next to impossible to “reproduce” for a normal household).
OK, sorry for the rambling – but that’s what you get for putting bread on the agenda 😉
cheers and Merry Christmas
Like I said, “them germans”. 😉 Rainer says, “Hah, your mixer only has 700 watts, what a joke. You need the 342,523 watt version I have. When I’m not kneading bread dough, I use it to mix concrete!”
My Bosch toy is a much braunier toy than the KA. The KA was 325 watts (the biggest they offered then). They do offer a couple more “professional” models now with bigger motors (525 watts) but they cost much, much more than the Bosch which has 700 watts. With twice the motor, the Bosch is certain to last much longer.
I only make a batch of bread once or twice a week. At that rate, the Bosch should last a few years. With that being the case, I could buy several Bosch Mixers over the course of a decade and still be money ahead.
Who has time to knead the dough by hand? With the Bosch I can spend 10 minutes in the kitchen dumping all the ingredients into it, leave for 10 minutes while it kneads, and then spend a few more minutes shaping it into loaves before tossing it into the oven for 25 minutes. I can have 4 loaves of fresh warm whole wheat bread in about an hour.
It’s not a question of watts. Unfortunately not.
If you look, the machines on the (German) ebay search-results page (I was to lazy to look for the equivalent ebay.com page) even have less watts than the Bosch.
It’s the gears (and the bearings) that are the problem – the wear and tear from making bread-dough is tremendous, compared with any other use of such a machine (milk-shakes, shredding veggies, grinding nuts – even milling wheat or spelt).
I guess it also has to do with the fact that the run-of-the-mill kitchen-machine (pun intended) needs to cater to so many uses: high-speed, low-power like creating a strawberry milk-shake or low-speed, high-power, like dough.
The specialized machines I found only do one thing (and that probably _very_ well). Consequently, their gears are designed and tuned for this purpose.
That said, I don’t want to sound like a salesman talking you into buying another costly apparatus or spoil your fun with making bread – to the contrary.
cheers,
Rainer
(Disclaimer: an uncle of mine has had a bakery for over 30 years (now retired) and I’ve seen his machines…)
I just stumbled onto your website after doing some research as to why my SECOND kitchen aid pro series mixer is emitting a black dust from the attachments shaft. It looks like I’m not the only one having a problem…and it all started when I started making bread. So now I think I’ll either try to return my machine or if I can’t, I’ll just get a replacement machine from kitchenaid and not use it for bread. Do you still recommend the Bosch for breadmaking? Are there any others?
Side note: I called kitchen aid today to tell them about the problem and how this is the second time it’s happening and they said they’ve never heard of such a thing.