Having trouble making that meringue?
At CES 2023, GE Profile showed off its newest stand mixer, the GE Profile Smart Mixer with AutoSense, which measures how hard the motor needs to work to whisk or beat, and automatically stops when it determines that what you're mixing is ready. I can see this being most useful for whipping egg whites; no more guessing as to whether your peaks are stiff enough.
But, that's not the only tech packed into the GE Profile mixer. For starters, there's a scale built into the mixer itself, so you can measure things directly into the bowl while it's hooked up to the mixer. A connected app on your smart phone has a number of recipes with measurements that will guide you along as you add ingredients.
You can also control the mixer remotely from your phone, setting timers for how long something should be mixed. And, as with many smart home devices, you can control it with Alexa and Google Assistant.
A small digital display on the front of the mixer shows the time remaining, weight of the ingredients you're adding, and the speed setting of the mixer. An LED ring around the top provides another visual clue, and a dial lets you manually adjust the speed of the mixer.
The Smart Mixer has a brushless digital motor, which GE Profile says is designed to prevent it from overheating if you have to run the mixer for a long time, or have to mix something particularly thick, like bread dough. It has a 7-quart bowl and comes with a whisk, a beater, and a dough hook; rather than using a bayonet-style attachment, they connect to the mixer with a quick-release clip, not unlike what you can find on some garden hoses.
GE Profile's smart mixer recently went on sale at Crate and Barrel for a whopping $999, and is available in black, gray, and white. That's much pricier than all of the best stand mixers; to put that in perspective, KitchenAid's most expensive model, the Pro Line, is $679.
There's a lot of clever innovations in the mixer — I particularly like the scales and the built-in timer — but you'd have to use your mixer a lot to make these new features worthwhile. And, if you're using a mixer that much, wouldn't you already know when your egg whites are beaten to perfection?
