Gadgetory

a stand mixer can make baking at home pretty simple all you have to do is dump in the ingredients and let the Sam mixer do the hard part plenty of companies make stand mixers but there's one brand that stands out above the rest so Sam mixers you know brought not only a lot of power to to mixing at home but also the design changed if you think about the shape of a KitchenAid paddle attachment it's like a some width kind of broad flat beater and in the design of it allows for a creaming motion which is when butter and sugar are smeared and a flat plain and then fold it over each other and when you look at doing something by hand or with a hand mixer and that's just cutting the butter it's it's not folding it over it's just slicing it very rapidly so being able to have a machine that incorporates so much air into an baked goods to do those and batters really change the style of baked goods that were available in America the first version of the stand mixer arrived in 1919 from the Hobart manufacturing company which would eventually become the brand kitchenaid we talked to Megan Elias a historian and the director of Boston University's gastronomy program about the new machines that arrived in the kitchen during this time it comes along really with electrification when you start to see electricity in ordinary people's homes which is really the 1920s I mean you have electricity you can have appliances so mixers first of course are in like professional kitchens they have them the smaller version that comes into the home kitchen they're really an object of the post-war period so 1920s people are still going out for their entertainment but it's in the 50s with super urbanization that families started really inviting other folks over and having parties in the household as people hosted more gatherings in their home KitchenAid wanted to give them a product that was worth showing off something that was less industrial and it felt more like it belongs in the kitchen how do you make appliances more approachable the answer across the industry was to add color we've always tried to be on the leading edge of color so we went from having just a handful of colors maybe 15 20 years ago to now we have over 90 different colors the ability to personalize the stand mixer added two kitchen aides appeal one of the early projects I was involved in as an engineer was launching several new colors I remember our customer service manager that was in-house come to me and was asking for some samples of the new colors and stuff and I wasn't sure exactly why and they actually knew of a customer that was constantly calling in and asking about new colors because this person actually collected them in fact some people design their entire kitchen around their mixers paint job that's just something really you know powerful about the allure of that kind of customization and that you can have you know these bright alluring colors for yourself as I mentioned earlier I I got one in the cup Burke and he read and paint in my kitchen to match it does seem to be a way that you make a statement about what kind of kitchen you have right is it a is it a kind of throwback retro kitchen and you have a paint mixer like pale green one or are you being like a modern slightly masculine kitchen with a black mixer or a steel mixer machinery in the kitchen expanded what desserts you could make it home before this people ate more pies they more puddings there are lots and lots of different kinds of desserts that you don't see anymore but the stand mixer makes specifically layer cakes much easier to do and so that becomes the standard of wow he really did something we invited professional Baker and editor Stella Parks to show us how stand mixers make angel food cake possible what's really cool about my method is the most angel food cakes you'd start whipping the meringue and then you ask really careful like add a little bit of sugar add a little bit of sugar add a little bit of sugar so the thing is that method is based on 19th century technique when people just have the Godot ver hand beater hand crank situation but with a mixer as powerful as the KitchenAid you can literally just put all the sugar and egg whites in there and then just whip it up so the goal of this kind of meringue is as a really runny meringue you don't want it to be anything that is stiff by any means but you do want it to have enough structure that it kind of it begins like mound up on itself in the bowl and that's how you know it's ready this particular technique is based on the availability of a stand mixer and it's not something you can do without one it's not something you can do with a hand mixer so it just it's it's definitely a recipe that's tailored to the power and design of a modern stand mixer our business is all about building kind of a passion around cooking and part of that comes from the memories of using our product with you know our mothers and our grandmothers or our dads in the kitchen and the fact that the design has been consistent since the early 60s the product still looks like what we would have remembered with our parents in the kitchen in a factory in Greenville Ohio about 1200 people paint inspect and assemble KitchenAid stand mixers much of this work is done by hand you find that perfect mix of quality and design that kind of touches that nerve with people the first thing comes into mind is like what coke went through with New Coke they had a product and they had a design they had something that worked and then they changed it you know we really haven't it worked really well in the 60s it works really well now our product looks just as good in the kitchen now as it did 50 60 years ago each stand mixer has a history take this yellow model it's almost 50 years old and it's still making cookies these things last for so long people get attached I had this beloved you know KitchenAid mixer that was like the family mixer growing up that I learned to bake on and I was coming over to like visit my parents and I was like driving to their house it was like a rainy day and I pulled into their driveway and I saw my precious baby sitting on the curb by the side of the road just rained on this - I know it's like I jump out of the car like pull it in and you're like I'm all like wet and dirty cause like dirt splashed up on it what are you guys do man capably it was like I don't know it was like seeing your dog it but there's something it was like this precious this precious memory of my childhood just by the curb so I took it back up to their house and you know honestly at that point it it really did need to be sent off to the farm but I just couldn't bear to be aware of that transition I just it's in a better place I need to not think about it it's just very important that that people never have a bad or negative memory of the product about it not working or about it not doing its job because then they're not going to have that that desire or passion to own one and and most of our customers are passionate about what they do in the kitchen and they they really want that product but it's important that that they always have good you know memories and and solid memories of it working when they were a kid and when they were growing up you