KitchenAids are wonderful, and I really agonized about the decision for several months before I got the DLX (in the meantime I got some great practice hand-kneading my own bread so no harm done). I still miss the colors and curves of my KAs. But I had to be practical: we are a family of 6, which means I have to bake a serious amount of bread each week. We also have been trying to eat healthier, which means the breads are usually whole grain. It’s the heaviness of whole-grain flour that killed both my KAs. KAs can handle egg whites, cookie dough and cake batter with aplomb, but don’t ask it to tackle the job of mixing a couple of batches of whole-grain dough. Mine was actually suffering for a few months before one day it suddenly started smoking, filling the room with this unbelievably horrible stench — the motor burning. I had left the machine to run for 15 minutes as called for by the recipe (a whole-grain bread recipe from Baking with Julia), and when I came back I could hardly breathe in the kitchen. It was wintertime, and I had to pack all 4 kids into the van and leave the house because the smell was just all over the place and I was afraid whatever gases there were could cause cancer in my kiddies’ lungs. We returned 3 hours later to find that the house still smelled. I unplugged the unit (a bandana around my nose) and took it outside, and then we left again and didn’t return ’til evening. Even then the smell wasn’t completely gone. Well anyway, enough of that horror story.

After the last one died I set on a quest to find *the best* mixer out there. I would have bought a Hobart (the predecessor of the KA, which was made better than the KAs of today) off of eBay but the models I found were too large for our family’s needs. Several fellow homeschooling moms who bake their own bread told me about their Bosches and referred me to the King Arthur Flour forum for more advice. Some posters there referred me to the yahoogroups mixer-owners, where I finally found the answers I was looking for.

Initially I thought my choices were either going to be the most powerful KA available or a Viking. The Viking users who were KA graduates naturally said the Viking was a much better machine. But if I were going to spend that much money on a mixer I wanted to explore all my options first so I can make a better-informed decision, so I started looking at other machines in that price range. From there it became a choice between the Bosch and the DLX. After e-mailing back and forth with several people, some of whom owned both machines (a couple actually became dealers because of their experience!), I decided on the DLX. Yes, it is on a higher price tier, but this is a lifetime investment for me and my family. I have yet to find a task that it can’t handle. Here is a link to more information on the DLX, from Pleasant Hill Grain; Everything Kitchens also has a comparison on several mixers. I’d love to tell you more about my DLX, but I’ll stop here and encourage you to do some googling yourself if you’re in the market for a mixer (or e-mail me at stefoodie (at) gmail (dot) com).