Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I always buy the least expensive product in a category to get the job done. I was able to get this mixer on sale for great price. Seemed like a great deal and good reviews. But just to see what I might be missing, I also ordered the cheapest Kitchenaid mixer. I figured the Kitchenaid would just be somewhat better, fancier than the Frigidaire. However thats not what it seems. Much to my surprise, comparing the two, the Frigidaire is barely functional vs. a fully functional Kitchenaid. Note that we are not experienced at stand mixers nor at making dough. This is our attempt to get into making dough. Frigidaire Making dough - When mixing dough... with the Frigidaire, the dough rises up the dough hook and keeps going up so that it ends up in the spring mechanism to hold the hook and still keeps going up into the axle and spinning plate under the mixer. I thought this was normal, but was a mess to clean up, so its clearly not what you're supposed to let happen. It could be that we overloaded the mixer. It was 5 cups of flour. The slowest speed on the mixer is pretty fast and is the speed you're supposed to use to make dough. Ultimately it worked but was difficult to deal with the dough on the top of the hook. I guess our other alternative would be to stop frequently and push the dough down, but it seemed to migrate up the hook quite quickly. I should also mention that the unit doesn't seem very strong or stable. Its plastic and the hinged top part doesn't sit tight against the bottom, there's a good bit of play. When working dough, the top part is moving around in all sorts of scary ways as if its going to break. Mixing: The blade mixer doesn't get anywhere near the bottom or the sides, so lots of material is left on the bottom and sides. It makes it impractical to mix smaller quantities. It also means that you need to stop and scrape down the sides and mix up the bottom. The slowest speed is pretty fast, so any sort of stirring or gentle folding is out of the question. If trying to mix some flour, because the slowest speed is to fast, you may end up with a mess. Whipping: We tried to whip 1 cup of heavy whipping cream. At maximum speed, the whisk barely reaches the cream at all. Eventually after minutes we started getting some whipped cream. After a second attempt we noticed that if we pressed down on the mixer head, it lowers the head at least 1/8th of an inch. Pressing down made a huge difference when whipping and we were able to get decent whipped cream fairly quickly. All of these scenarios didn't work that well for different reasons with the Frigidaire. Other concerns include: - The manual says to run it for a maximum of 6 minutes before letting it cool for 10. - The tilt head doesn't tilt that much. - The speed range 1-8 is sort of a joke. The minimum is 1, which is really pretty fast. There is nothing like a stir setting. Range 1-6 is almost the same with very little difference. From 6 on to 8 it speeds up a lot, but even top speed 8 isn't really that much faster than 1. A little less than twice as fast by my measure. The Kitchenaid didn't just do a little better, it feels functional. It actually works. I guess the Frigidaire is the cheapest planetary mixer I could find, and it does what it claims, but does it so poorly that its questionably useful. The Kitchenaid does not have a time limit. The entire unit is heavy metal. It feels very precise, close tolerances, no play in movement. The recipes in the manual regularly call for 5 cups of flour (which overloaded the Fridigaire). We haven't tried that much but presumably it works. The speed range is amazing in comparison. There is a stir setting that is probably about 1/2 the speed of "2". 2 is similar to 1 (the minimum) on the Frigidaire. The max speed 10 is MUCH faster than 8 on the Frigidaire. Roughly speed 10 is about 3 revolutions/second vs. about 2 revolutions/second for the Frigidaire on its top setting of 8. The Frigidaire is incredibly loud. Even on 1 its earth shattering and sounds like its going to break something. It gets hot after a few minutes. On its max setting 8 its much much louder. The Kitchenaid is pretty quiet on stir, still quiet on 2. Maxed out to 10 its pretty loud but much quieter than the Frigidaire. And it doesn't sound like its going to break apart. Making dough: The hook in the Kitchenaid has a wide disk at the top of the hook. This effectively stops the dough from climbing beyond the top of the hook and gumming up the works like in the Frigidaire. This is a huge difference and makes this one work. Its also nice to have the stir speed to calmly do some of the initial mixing. Dough from this machine has been great. I will comment though that using only 3 cups of flour with 50% hydration, it does seem to struggle at times. At times it sounds like it may almost stall. Adding a little water loosens it up, but still sometimes need to push it a little beyond 2 to get more power. The manual warns not to kneed dough faster than 2 or the unit can be damaged. Mixing: The Kitchenaid has an adjustment to be able to precisely lower the head. An online video said to lower it until it just barely moves a dime at the bottom. Thats very close to the bottom. We adjusted it and it works great. It is able to mix small quantities and is much closer to the bottom and sides than the Frigidaire. Its a big difference. The stir speed is also very useful for dry mixing to not have flour going everywhere. Whipping: While we were eventually able to whip some cream with the Frigidaire, the experience with the Kitchenaid was radically different to the point of saying the Frigidaire doesn't really work. The Kitchenaid is able to run MUCH faster and the whisk much lower in the bowl. The end result is that whipping the same 1 cup of cream very very quickly resulted in amazingly voluminous whipped cream, ie it made a lot of whipped cream and did it fast. Overall impressions. I guess Frigidaire does what it says. Its a planetary mixer. It can mix, it can make dough, it can whip cream if you use enough, but it does it so much worse than the Kitchenaid that its almost not worth it. Its not that the Kitchenaid does it somewhat better, its more like the Frigidaire is barely functional at any of it vs. the Kitchenaid being fully capable. Its not a subtle difference. We were very surprised. Not what we expected.