The Best Hand Mixers

Hand mixers are a useful addition to any baker's kitchen. We often use them to whip cream, cream together butter and sugar for baked goods, and beat egg whites for meringue. They also take up less storage space than a stand mixer and are much easier to maneuver. We were looking for a mixer that was powerful and easy to use and had a range of speed settings, and we found all that and more in our new winner, the Breville Handy Mix Scraper. We also love our Best Buy, the Cuisinart Power Advantage Plus 9 Speed Hand Mixer with Storage Case, which offers similar mixing prowess without the bells and whistles of our winner.

What You Need to Know 

Hand mixers strike a happy medium between combining ingredients by hand and hauling out a heavy stand mixer every time you want to mix. We use them in the test kitchen for whipping cream; beating egg whites into meringue; and combining ingredients for single batches of cookies, cakes, or pies. We think a hand mixer is an especially good option for people looking to get into baking without making a huge investment, people who don’t have much storage space, and people with arthritis or certain disabilities that prevent them from lifting a larger mixer. While hand mixers make many baking projects much easier, we’ve found that they are not powerful enough to mix most bread or pizza doughs, despite some manufacturers’ claims. Still, we think they can be an important and convenient addition to your kitchen arsenal.

All hand mixers include two standard beater attachments; some also include one or two whisk attachments and a pair of spiral-shaped dough hooks. After first testing all the models with their beaters, we tested the models equipped with whisk attachments by preparing an additional batch of meringue. Finally, we outfitted our top two models with their dough hooks and mixed Bagel Bread (more on this below). 

What to Look For

• Wide Beater Heads: Beater heads with wider diameters (at least 2 inches across) mixed most efficiently, since they were able to move a larger volume of ingredients at once. They also trapped less cookie dough, since chunkier ingredients such as chocolate chips and rolled oats were able to pass through the broader gaps between the tines more easily. 
• Simple, Intuitive Controls: The mixers came with analog or digital controls (a couple mixers had both). We liked both styles, as long as the controls were simple: a single wheel to scroll or two buttons for adjusting speed up and down.
• Wide Range of Speed Settings: Every mixer supposedly offered a range of slow and fast speed settings (from five to nine). But the slowest settings on some mixers were much too fas...
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