Mixer Review

Comparing performance among stand and hand mixers

Unless you frequently work with stiff batters or bread dough, a powerful hand mixer might be enough to meet your needs, saving you money and storage space. Editors at Cook's Illustrated magazine suggest a hand mixer for "light-duty tasks, such as whipping cream or egg whites, mixing cake batter and mashing potatoes." Using a hand mixer, however, can be tiring when mixing heavy dough or ingredients that incorporate slowly. Not only do stand mixers leave your hands free to do other tasks, such as add ingredients, they more effectively mix ingredients. Top-rated stand mixers spin the beater in one direction and rotate it around the bowl in the opposite direction, resulting in thoroughly blended ingredients. Of course, stand mixers are a lot heavier and more expensive than hand mixers. Noise level is not universally better for one or the other.

We found the most recent and comprehensive reviews of hand and stand mixers at ConsumerReports.org. This hand mixer review evaluates nine hand mixers by whipping cream and mixing chocolate chips into cookie batter. Editors also compare 25 stand mixers at whipping, kneading cookie dough and removing lumps in mashed potatoes. Both of these reviews give separate ratings for convenience and noise.

Good Housekeeping and Cook's Illustrated are other excellent resources for professional reviews of stand and hand mixers. Both assess each model on a variety of mixing, whipping and kneading tasks. The Good Housekeeping Research Institute includes 12 stand and 15 hand mixers in its lineup and provides detailed information about the pros and cons of each. Cook's Illustrated magazine has a recent review of hand mixers and two older reviews of stand mixers (one focuses on high-end models, the other covers stand mixers priced under $200).

Several other home and foodie magazines feature mixer reviews. Food & Wine magazine tests hand mixers among nine categories of small kitchen appliances, but the specific number of hand mixers tested is not mentioned. Additionally, two of the four products that do receive favorable reviews for ease of operation, mixing dough and cleanup are now discontinued. Editors at Bon Appétit magazine identify their favorite hand mixer, but we aren't sure if it was compared to other models as testing methodology isn't revealed.

Cooking.com and Amazon.com lead the pack in providing the best owner reviews for both stand and hand mixers. Many mixer models have several hundred reviews and one product actually features feedback from more than 1,900 owners. Viewpoints.com also offers an extensive number of reviews by consumers.

One consideration worth noting: Most top-rated stand mixers use a single beater mounted on a rotating disc, with bowls remaining stationary during mixing. This process, called "planetary action," has been shown to be the most time-efficient and effective way of blending ingredients, since the beater reaches the sides of the bowl. As a result, there is little need to stop the machine and scrape the sides of the bowl. Stand mixers like the Sunbeam Heritage Series (*Est. $185) with stationary, dual beaters and a bowl that sits on a rotating turntable tend to earn lower ratings in reviews, since they often don't incorporate ingredients as well along the edge of the bowl. This particular stand mixer also gets numerous complaints about early breakdowns at Amazon.com.