Hello all,
I am very happy to have found this site and to see that there are a lot of
bakers out there. I had the opportunity to apprentice under a german baker
and a french pastry chef for about 3 years, 20 years ago at Susanne Naegele
bakery in Northampton, Massachusetts. There is a lot to be said for
traditional apprenticeship study. I have been plugging away, unaided ever
since. This is a great list and I am glad that there are so many bakers -
professional and non - who participate. I live in a Zen temple so there
are always a lot to feed and all of my experiments get eaten. I love to
make bread by hand but usually due to the volume of dough I work with, I
use a mixer. I have noticed that there is a new mixer out that is being
advertised in the cooking catalogues that I get made by Viking in a 5 and 7
quart size. I came across some previous discussion on the new Kitchenaid
mixers a while back. I have a commercial kitchenaid mixer that I acquired
in 1990 that works great and I have been able to do 4 dough batches back to
back without a problem. I could probably due more, but I just have never
tried. I also have a Magic mill mixer that was given to me as a gift that
I can mix larger batches of dough in - using 14 cups of flour (I can fit in
more flour, but it starts to get messy), but I don't think it kneads the
dough very well. When Kitchenaid came out with their larger model, I
acquired one. I had used it a few times when it just died in the middle of
mixing a batch of dough. I took it to be repaired and was informed that
the motor died. It was replaced under warrantee. The next time I used it,
it happened again and the motor was again replaced. The repair people told
me that the new Kitchenaid mixers had a different kind of motor that in
their opinion wasn't very good. The motors are stated to have a higher
wattage, but they are smaller and overheat quicker. They told me that the
older models were much better and that the new models were basically
garbage. This is probably old news to a lot of you but I thought I would
retell my story for anyone who is new and hasn't had a chance to research
all the older postings. Anyway, has anyone used the new Viking mixers?
Mary Stackhouse