This Is What You Need To Know About Kitchen Mixers

The paddle attachment mixes ingredients without whipping too much air into them. It's most commonly used to "cream" butter and sugar, which means you beat butter and sugar together with the paddle attachment for a few minutes until the mixture is light and fluffy. This is the first step when you make most cookies and cakes, and also when you make frosting.

The whisk attachment also beats, but it whips more air into the thing it's mixing — let's say, egg whites — which increases its volume. It's commonly used to make meringue (which are just whipped egg whites and sugar that have been baked) or to whip a bowl of heavy cream, which is simply how you make "whipped cream."

The dough hook kneads dough. The first step for most yeasted bread recipes (meaning, anything that needs to rise before you bake it, like regular bread, pizza dough, or cinnamon rolls) is to combine flour with water, maybe milk and sugar, and some yeast, then knead that dough for several minutes. You could do it by hand, or use a dough hook and a stand mixer.

Again, stand mixers are better than hand mixers for anything you have to beat, knead, or whip for longer than a minute, since the machine does all of the work for you. Stand mixers are also good for recipes that call for ingredients to be added while mixing, since they leave you with two free hands.

"Wait, the hand mixer attachments look a lot like the stand mixer attachments!?"

Correct.

The shredding disk doesn't actually mix anything. It's used to grate fruits, vegetables and cheeses. Let's say you have a peeled carrot, for example. You turn on the machine with the shredded disk attachment fitted on it, then feed the carrot through the tube at the top of the food processor, and it gets shredded. You can do this with cabbage to make coleslaw, raw potatoes to make latkes, or cheese when you need tons of grated cheese.

The slicing disk works the same way and doesn't mix anything, either. Use it to slice fruits, vegetables or cheeses super thin. This is helpful with potatoes and turnips or other root vegetables when you want to make a gratin or fry homemade chips.

The s-blade chops ingredients while mixing them together. You rough-chop ingredients by pulsing them—meaning, you start and stop the blade repeatedly, as opposed to letting it continuously run—to your desired consistency. So let's say you want to make spinach artichoke dip: You'd combine artichoke hearts, spinach, sour cream, mayo, cheese, and salt in a food processor then just pulse until you have dip. Same for pesto — pulse basil, garlic, and pine nuts, then add oil and mix a little more. You can also use the s-blade to grind meat (or fish, beans, or tofu) and then add garlic, breadcrumbs, and sauce to the machine to make burgers, meatballs, sausages. (This is called making a farce in traditional French cuisine.) S-blades are also good for making hummus or nut butters: You can use them to pulverize chickpeas or nuts into a coarse paste (which won't work in a blender because blenders need liquid to get moving).