Posts tagged ‘stand mixer’

I graduated college in 1999, but didn’t get my first “real” job, the kind with benefits, until January of 2000. Essentially, I’ve lived my entire “grown-up life” in the aughts and as I ponder the jobs I’ve had, all the traveling I did, friends and lovers come and gone, and a world with many sharp shifts, I also think about what I was eating. It has been both a hungry and fulfilling decade.

My friend C.C. and I like to refer to the very early aughts as “The Sex and the City” era. We were both working and playing hard at a dot com way downtown, accruing stock options in lieu of 401ks, and drinking a lot of cocktails. Though I was always a dirty martini girl, the drink du jour was the Cosmo. Then came apple martinis, espresso martinis, a resurgence of Manhattans, and pomegranate martinis. With our 10-dollar drinks, we also scarfed down huge amounts of sushi. Sushi was everywhere, even the grocery store, and I was able to convince my Dad, a meat-and-baked-ziti kind of guy, to try a tuna avocado roll. Dudes in banker blue button-down shirts were eating steak like it was going out of style. Any man who hadn’t sunk his incisors into a wedge of Kobe beef hadn’t yet really arrived.

The stock market had a mini-crash, the dot coms started folding, and I lost my job. I stopped swilling martinis and started doing a lot of daytime reading on Cedar Hill in Central Park. One book passed on to me was The Botany of Desire. “Have you ever heard of Michael Pollan? He writes for the Times,” asked my friend Christina, whose cooking prowess increased as the relationship with her boyfriend grew more serious. “I never thought I would be interested in botany, but this guy really opens your eyes.”

>> Read on for details on the rest of the decade in food >>

Apparently every woman that was once a Girl Scout remembers an activity where she put cream in a glass jar and vigorously shook it until it turned into butter. Kelly green never being my color, I wasn’t a Girl Scout, nor did I know that making butter was such a simple process. I assumed you needed a churn, a bonnet, perhaps a 19th century farmhouse. How wonderful to learn that homemade butter can be made in a stand mixer!

For those of you who remember my stand mixer fire, I just received a new one in the mail after Kitchen Aid confirmed that, yes, the previous one was defective. At this point, I’ve made pizza dough by hand a couple of times, so I wanted the inaugural stir to be something I would never do sans mixer.

Toss 2 cups of room temperature heavy cream into the bowl and start mixing it on 4 or 5. (I used organic cream from Ronnybrook Farm in the Hudson Valley.) Within 4 or 5 minutes, the cream will start to solidify and you should lower the mixing speed to 2 or 3. Give it another 2 minutes and your cream will start turning yellow. Butter!!

Once the butter is yellow and solidified, the buttermilk will start to separate. Buttermilk is a delicious sounding word, but it’s really just the grey butter juice that you’re going to have to knead out, lest your butter go rancid quickly. Transfer your butter to a colander in the sink and use your hands to squeeze it until all the buttermilk has been pressed out. Certainly, you should save it if you have a recipe on hand that calls for buttermilk, but I was a bit grossed out and let mine run down the drain. In the end, you’ll have at least one full cup of butter!

I decided to make a bagna cauda butter (anchovy and garlic) to bring to my family’s Neapolitan Christmas Eve seafood dinner. I spread the butter into ramekins, covered the top with a layer of sea salt, and cut little circles of parchment paper to seal them.  If you are in need of a last minute gift idea, consider making butter and using some of these other recipes for compound butters.

Remember the Ask Casey post about shelling out for a stand mixer? Well, that question was asked by me. For a long time now, I’ve been feeling the pressure to buy one, but have resisted due to sticker shock. It’s hard to justify 300 sheckles. Plus, I’m not a baker. I have limited cravings for sweets and following precise directions makes my brain hurt.

Yet, because I continued to feel a nagging pull, I asked Casey, who persuaded me to bite the KitchenAid bullet. I started getting all Martha, fantasizing about the smell of fresh bread in my apartment and the festive holiday cookies I would make. I told my mom that I wanted the pasta attachment for Christmas.  Ah, heck who am I kidding? It was the colors that won me over! Don’t these beasts look like they were painted with nail polish? I’m drawn to Volkswagens for the same reason.

I did a lot of homework and kept my eyes on all the sales. Finally, Macy’s had a Veteran’s Day sale that I couldn’t resist. The KitchenAid stand mixer was on sale for $189! The downside was that this price was for the Classic which is plain white.  The mint green one that I was drooling over was a whopping $100 more! I wiped my chin and went for the Classic. It felt like the most grown-up purchase I had made since buying my couch. I had done my research and clipped my coupons. I even got finger blisters from carrying this little workhorse a mere four blocks from the subway to my apartment.
>> Guess what happened next… >>

Once you’ve decided to take the plunge and buy your Crayola-colored KitchenAid stand mixer and pasta roller attachments, don’t wait another second—grab your flour and eggs and get ready to gorge on homemade pasta.

I use the basic recipe of one egg and 3 oz. of flour (or approximately 1/2 cup if you don’t have a kitchen scale) per person, based on the excellent ratio from Michael Ruhlman’s book. To that, I add a healthy glug of olive oil and a sprinkling of kosher salt.

If you have a kitchen scale, place a large bowl on the scale, turn on/zero it out, and spoon your flour into the bowl until you have the right number of ounces. If you don’t have a kitchen scale, read this and see why it’s a valuable tool. And then measure your flour by spooning flour out of the bag/bin into your measuring cup and leveling with a knife, rather than dipping the measuring cup directly into the flour. (Because of how widely a cup of flour can very in weight, this is how you should always measure it.)

Make a well in the middle of the flour, crack your eggs into the center, add the olive oil and salt, and start stirring the pool of eggs with your fingers. The eggs will mix and slowly incorporate the flour. I’m sure you’ve seen Anne Burrell do this right on her board on Iron Chef America, but trust me—it’s much easier in the bowl because you’re not worried about the egg breaking the flour “wall” and oozing all over the counter.

>> Making pasta dough is almost too easy >>

As a home cook with decent chops, I feel pressured to buy one of those giant, cool looking mixers in a bright color. But it ain’t cheap. Can you tell me if it’s really worth the investment and counter space?

Yes, yes, unequivocally yes. My gorgeous tangerine KitchenAid stand mixer was purchased in 2003 as a reward to myself for my first promotion; it was the first time in my professional life that I would no longer be responsible for ordering someone else’s lunch and even on my assistant editor’s salary (actually, still the same salary as when I was an editorial assistant), I felt it was worth the splurge.

Six years later, I am still not regretting blowing my small budget on the machine. If you think you’re not a baker, this might be the tool that changes your mind. The standard mixer comes with a flat paddle beater, whisk, and dough hook, with which you can:

• beat egg whites (so now you can make souffles, marshmallow fluff, angel food cake…)
• mix up cookie dough, even the really thick ones like biscotti
• mix up cake batter
• make pizza dough
• make bread dough
• whip fresh whipped cream
• make homemade frosting for your store-bought brownies
• make homemade mayonnaise

I could go on. The overwhelming benefit of having the stand mixer is that it takes care of a lot of tasks that would otherwise kill your arms or take a lot of time to do by hand — for instance, I’ll have it whip my egg whites while I’m simultaneously heating my waffle maker and mixing together waffle batter in a separate bowl, so the whites will be ready to fold in as soon as the green light blinks. (Of course, the mixer doesn’t clean my waffle maker after I’m done with brunch, but that’s a separate problem.)

And let’s say it’s used once a month, on average — $250, the approximate price of the mixer, divided by 12 leaves you with about $20 per use. Amortize that over the amount of time you’ll own the thing (I don’t know anyone who has worn theirs out, even after 20-30 years of use) and it’s a pretty convincing investment.

There are a whole slew of attachments you can purchase separately, but if you don’t want to spring for any extras off the bat, you’ll have more than enough to do with the given beaters. However, if I had to choose just one (like buying a vowel in Wheel of Fortune!), I would go with the pasta roller attachments. These things are incredible—I could not imagine hand-cranking pasta through a roller, but now I have homemade pasta within my reach as long as I have an hour to spare. Only an hour! Hey, I think I feel a homemade pasta post coming on….

And, note to Santa: I also have my eye on the meat grinder attachment so I can finally start making my own hamburgers and be worthy in the eyes of Michael Pollan.

Update: How could I forget that you can make your own butter with a stand mixer? All you need is heavy cream, and it is so cool, it’s like something out of Mr. Wizard.

Ask Casey takes on your food questions every Thursday, but quotes song lyrics in the posts on a less-frequent basis. Email me at caseyATgoodfoodstoriesDOTcom.