I have recently bought the KitchenAid Artisan 5-Quart Stand Mixer for my home, and totally love it. I use it the most for making homemade biscotti from scratch which is a hobby a a love of mine. Biscotti dough can be very tricky, either extremely sticky or hard to mix, and I have broken several hand held mixers over the years.
When I first got the KitchenAid Artisan mixer, I was having a problem with getting all of the ingredients in the bowl to mix properly, so I got out the manual, and realized that the KitchenAid company had built in an adjustable beater bowl clearance into the mixer for just this purpose. You can change the height of the beaters in relationship to the mixing bowl. I am not very technical minded, so I called the KitchenAid support line to help me adjust this properly, just to make sure that I did it right.
When you bake, it is important that all of the ingredients of a recipe get blended well into the dough, otherwise the dough will not bake properly, so as you can imagine, having the perfect adjustment of the beaters was important to me.
KitchenAid has a superior support department, and they walked me through what I needed to do.
The easiest way to know that your beater bowl clearance is set correctly is by putting a dime into the bottom of the KitchenAid Artisan mixer bowl. Then turn on the mixer at setting 2 using the flat beater, and if it is set properly, it should move the dime about 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch each time the bowl rotates. If that happens, then you know that you have the mixer set to mix everything at the bottom of the bowl into your dough (or whatever else you are mixing), and not too low to cause extra wear and tear on the beater. If the beaters are set too close to the bowl, then over time the extra friction will wear down the beaters prematurely.
To adjust the clearance setting, just move the beater adjustment screw 1/4 turn each time until the dime moves the right amount. Once you have the beaters set correctly, you will be able to do any job with this mixer, as large or small a job as you need.
Once the beaters were set at the right height, the dough mixed perfectly, and I was able to make biscotti to my heart's delight.
