A hand mixer is a kitchen pinch hitter, a device sometimes referred to as upon to do fast and never terribly demanding duties. With a pair of rotating beaters and a light-weight handheld setup, it is not often the most effective or strongest device for the job. But a good mannequin does simply nice when making one thing like whipped cream, these beaters clicking away on the within of the bowl, eliciting a Pavlovian drool from family and friends awaiting dessert. They don’t carry out in addition to stand mixers, and generally you could possibly do the identical work by hand, however I like having one in my kitchen.
If you will indulge another baseball analogy, this explicit Cuisinart hand mixer throws an added curveball: It’s cordless.
To which, my first and enduring query is: Why?
What I’d come to study is that there is undoubtedly an viewers for the Cuisinart EvolutionX Cordless Hand Mixer, and people are the individuals who have a dearth {of electrical} shops of their kitchens. I’ve a number of of those individuals in my life. I thought-about shopping for every of them a pleasant energy strip with an ample-length wire out of pity, however they needed to snap up the brand new mixer as quickly as I advised them about it.
Now I’m no Luddite in naysayer’s clothes. I personal and love a pleasant DeWalt cordless drill, and as a child rising up in a semi-rural New Hampshire city, I might have killed for a cordless weed whacker. Whether you are a contractor or a weekend warrior working by way of a “honey-do” listing, it is good to have the ability to roam the home or yard with out lugging an enormous extension wire round behind you. But within the kitchen, the place ya gonna go? Most of us have one spot the place we stand to make dinner. Plus, not like my DeWalt drill and plenty of different cordless instruments on the market, the Cuisinart’s battery is not detachable. When it dies, you will in all probability find yourself doing a wholesale swap out, tossing the entire contraption and shopping for a brand new one.
So I charged it up and gave it a whirl. For reference, I in contrast it to my top-rated, corded, and cheaper KitchenAid hand mixer, doing head-to-head checks with every little thing I made.
Beat Report
Photograph: Cuisinart
Testing began out with a doozy, mixing pâte sucrée dough. I actually ought to have used a stand mixer, however this may inform me loads in regards to the Cuisinart proper off the bat. Adding butter, then water to the dry substances, it clearly wasn’t as easy as it might be with a stand mixer. When I swapped in my KitchenAid hand mixer, it was clearly much less slowed down by the entire affair. Still, they each did higher than I assumed they might.
Mixer abuse continued by making lamb meatballs à la Hugh Acheson, and little pork meatballs for Italian marriage ceremony soup. Really, it’s best to combine these along with your palms, but when the hand mixers had ample energy and a slow-enough low velocity, they’d be nice.
“Its like Bass-O-Matic,” my spouse, Elisabeth, cheerily exclaimed as she breezed by way of the kitchen. The Cuisinart carried out like a corded hand mixer that was simply in a position to do the job. My KitchenAid hand mixer achieved the duty with a bit extra élan. Working with the meat, nonetheless, helped convey a number of design points to the fore.
The lack of a beater eject button on the Cuisinart meant I grabbed the meaty beaters by their greasy enterprise finish to take away them. On my KitchenAid, I simply pressed a button, grabbed the shaft the place it was clear, and popped them within the dishwasher. There’s additionally an odd selection of a textured floor on the underside of the Cuisinart’s deal with and the highest of the motor. A clean and easy-to-clean floor could be much less of a long-term gunk magnet.
Similarly, the USB cable port with its little rubber cowl sits scant millimeters above the countertop whenever you set the entire thing down. It’s good to have the ability to relaxation the mixer on its heel, the way in which you would possibly relaxation an iron. But it is arduous to think about that over the course of its life you will not unintentionally find yourself with flour or egg whites or a blast of water from the sink moving into that port. There’s additionally the battery-charging LEDs, which needlessly grew to become the brightest lights of all my kitchen home equipment when the mixer was plugged in. Something much more refined could be loads.
