The Essential Mixer Cookbook: 150 Effortless Recipes For Your Stand Mixer and All of Its Attachments
The Essential Mixer Cookbook: 150 Effortless Recipes For Your Stand Mixer and All of Its Attachments
A new generation of cooks is discovering the stand mixers that were a fixture in their grandmothers’ kitchens, but they may be intimidated by all those attachments. The Essential Mixer Cookbook is here to show how to use them to prepare soups, appetizers, main dishes, and an array of baked goods — cookies, pastries, breads, and cakes — with far less effort than you would expect. There are over 150 recipes for dishes such as Hummus and Pita, Italian Foccaccia, and Strawberry and Passionfruit
List Price: $ 19.95
Price: $ 19.95
Did the writers actually test these recipes?,
I really wanted to like this book. The photographs are gorgeous and all the recipes sound and look divine. But I have yet to try a recipe from the book that didn’t need at least minor tweaking to work, and one of the recipes ended up causing a huge (and expensive) problem.
Some of the problems are minor: The basic pasta dough needs about two tablespoons of water to come together properly, and the spinach pasta will need more. Some aren’t so minor: I have no idea what on earth the pretzel recipe is supposed to produce (paving bricks, maybe?), but the dry, stiff, crumbly dough was impossible to work with even after I added a lot of water and kneaded it vigorously with the dough hook and with my hands. I went over the ingredients several times to make sure I didn’t miss something, so I’m inclined to wonder if the recipe as it’s written in the book is missing an ingredient or a step.
And then there are the downright disastrous problems: The tagliatelle (pasta) recipe produces too much dough for a 5-quart Artisan KitchenAid to handle. The dough clogged the workbowl, jammed the dough hook, and burned out my KA’s motor in just a few seconds.
Maybe there are some decent recipes in the book (I’m too afraid to try another one and risk my poor mixer again), but I’d advise fellow KitchenAid addicts to look elsewhere.
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|Great Pictures,
About a month ago, I received a Kitchenaid stand mixer for my bridal shower. I wasn’t sure how to use it so I ordered 3 cookbooks from Amazon. I ordered “The Essential Mixer,” “The Mixer Bible” and “Mix It Up.” The book that I like most is “The Essential Mixer…” because it has beautiful pictures. In addition, The recipes are easy to understand and use everyday ingredients. In the front of the book there is a recipe chart/ index that shows you at a glance what recipes use which attachments. Each recipe is from a different country so if you are trying to create a menu it is easy to determine what foods will compliment each other based on the country it originated in. I loved how the recipes include speeds, times and attachments use. So far I tried making the guacamole, tiramisu and orange chiffon cake. They were all delicious. I’m planning a Mother’s Day brunch with the Leek & Zucchini quiche, onion soup Gratinee and lemon au citron recipes for dessert.
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|A big letdown,
I was so excited to pick up this book! I brought it home and started flipping through and thought “What great pictures!”. Then, I actually read through the recipes and was EXTREMELY disappointed. I earmarked 8, (yes-8!) that I could or would actually want to try. Everything else is just too fancy and impractical. I’m not sure what kind of family this is meant for, but it’s definitely not mine.
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