Cooking & Baking
In reply to the discussion: Help! I want to surprise my wife with a KitchenAid Mixer [View all]Major Nikon
(36,827 posts)One of my favorite, or at least the one I use the most is the meat grinding attachment. If you grind a lot of meat, you'll be better off with a dedicated meat grinder, even if it's just a good quality hand crank one. The reason is because the pieces are made of plastic and it's not really designed for very heavy duty use or large volumes. The biggest job I ever have it do is grind up a chuck roast and provided you slice it into strips small enough for the grinder to handle, it does fine for that. Don't wash the metal blades in the dishwasher as they aren't stainless and will rust. You can also get an attachment for filling sausage casings which works reasonably well. Again if you're not doing too much sausage, it works fine.
There's an aftermarket all metal meat grinding attachment you can get. I don't own one, but if I didn't already own the OEM one I'd probably opt for that one. The OEM comes with a vegetable strainer. I almost never use it. It does work reasonably well but is a pain to clean.
Pasta: I have both the pasta extruder and the set of three pasta rollers. The pasta extruder doesn't work very well, IMO. You need just the right consistency of dough for it to work. I prefer to make pasta dough out of semolina flour which doesn't work well in the extruder. The pasta roller set on the other hand works very well. If you've ever used a hand crank pasta roller it's a godsend.
I like the ice cream attachment. I don't make ice cream very often, but when I do it works quite well.
I have the older style slicer/shredder. I never liked it much. If you don't have a food processor it might be worth having, but I prefer to use my food processor which will do everything the attachment will do and does it better.
I have the citrus juicer attachment. I almost never use it and prefer just to use my hand model because I almost never do more than one or two pieces of citrus. I think if I were squeezing a lot of orange juice, I'd buy a good quality citrus press instead.