Review on 🍞 Hamilton Beach 63325 Stand Mixer, 6 Speed Electric with Stainless Steel 3.5 Quart Bowl, Planetary Mixing, Tilt-Up Head, 300 Watt Motor, Black by Prem Robinson

I'm taking a baking class and I quickly realized that if I really want to learn something I have to practice at home, and for that I need a "planet" mixer. In the classroom, our mixers are sufficient Industrial-grade KitchenAid on the Volrath and Hobart, with the latter two being machines that do complex, high-end cookie and bread testing tasks. It was an introductory lesson and we did a bit of everything, but what interested me the most was bread. Because I take learning to bake very seriously, I started studying and evaluating planetary kneaders. Since I'm on a tight budget and not quite sure I'll be able to continue, my goal was to find an "entry level" tabletop mixer with planetary mixing. To be clear, planetary refers to the action of each mixer working in the bowl. For example, when using a paddle tool, the paddle rotates in the bowl much like a whisk, but there's a secondary motion where a separate gear rotates around the bowl as the paddle turns - so there's a double action involved planetary mixer. I bought this for $79 based on the reviews and really had a feeling it would be good for practice and eventually if my passion for baking lasts I'll just dig it into the ground for now. I kind of felt like if something goes wrong I don't invest much and if it breaks it was the cheapest blender I could find. BUT. IMPRESSIVE! I'm NOT a baker but an aspiring student baker and I can honestly tell you I'm f***ing out of this thing and can't kill it! At home I've made 14 dozen French Lean Pastry Buns, 8 dozen Fortified Pastry Buns, 7 Pear Frangipane Tarts, and several batches of cookies. Now I mainly want to talk about bread as there is a lot of talk about how it mixes bread dough and the reason I think this little mixer needs some respect is because during training I didn't know what I was doing. I kneaded the dough with the bread hook for too long and often at a higher speed. However, bread dough can be very forgiving in the oven and it worked fine, but the amazing thing is that I unknowingly abused this mixer and it just kept going. Each bread recipe called for 18 ounces. flour with one (lean French) containing 100% bread flour, the other (enriched) containing 12/6 oz. Separation of bread and flour AP. Due to my inexperience and some experiments. Sometimes I kneaded the dough for up to an hour when it only took 10 or 15 minutes. This made the mixer very warm and I could hear it running at times, but it still works just as well as it did the day I took it out of the box. Made of plastic with a metal shell and suction cups. It's no louder than the mixers at school. It has 3.5sqm a stainless steel bowl which is a bit small. While I have found them useful for practice, I will eventually upgrade to a larger capacity blender. However, at 300 watts - which is a little short in terms of performance - it never fought in the way I'd imagined. He started to work a little and then recovered as if changing gears. This blender turned out to be a pleasant surprise and even after the upgrade I'll be keeping this little guy as a backup and secondary blender when I update. If you're an avid baker with heavy-duty, heavy-duty formulas, you should probably give up.