I was shopping Dacor and Thermador ranges when my wife reminded me that we're expecting a second child, and said she thought spending $2,000+ for a stove would be reckless. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but she was right. I'm happy to report this KitchenAid helped rinse the bad taste out of my mouth. I think the designers made good trade-offs to deliver Champagne on a beer budget.

The cooktop is a dream.
The stove has two simmer burners, and two hotter ones, one of which produces 14,000 btu. It's just a little more than you need to make a piece of beef jump back out of a pan. This burner is a cast-iron frying pan's best friend. ;-) All four burners work flawlessly down to extremely low levels too.

The huge grates are pretty, but we weren't quite sure what the practical benefit was until we were baking cookies. The huge flat heat-impervious surface is just the thing to set that 400 degree cookie sheet on before the heat comes through the oven mit and nips at your fingers. This is really nice.

Oven...
The electronic oven controls are sleek (under glass) and allow a lot of cooking modes you wouldn't have in a conventional oven, such as cooking with a temperature probe, so the oven beeps and shuts off when the probe reaches the programmed temp.

Cutting corners?
Well, from just below the cooktop down to the floor, the oven starts to look a lot like a much lower end Whirlpool (KithenAid's parent company). The KitchenAid does have a convection blower, which I haven't seen on the Whirlpools, but they may offer convection on some models, and I haven't noticed.

The range we replaced was made in 1960 and June Cleaver would have been right at home with it. It had it's issues up top, but the oven was huge and the natural convection was to die for. My wife bakes a lot of sweets and I like to bake bread, so we're keeping our fingers crossed that the much smaller new oven does okay. The KitchenAid certainly looks a lot fuller with a cookie sheet in it so I wonder about the natural convection. So far we haven't been disappointed, but we've only had the range for 2 months.

My only real gripe about this stove is the significant loss of space in the oven due to the size and placement of the convection blower. It's nothing but a fan attached to the back of the oven that sticks 2 or 2 1/2 inches into the oven's interior. Depending on what you bake this may or may not matter, but for us, we curse it whenever we go to use the "large-size" pizza pan. It doesn't fit anywhere except on the bottom rack below the lowest part of the blower. We've been able to make a good pizza on that rack, although it might brown prettier up higher, but the blower position is still a design liability. The fancier ranges such as the Dacor and Thermador ovens have the blower unit positioned so it doesn't intrude on the oven's cooking space.

Also, other reviewers have commented about the hassle of keeping the gray stove-top grates clean, Here's my two cents: Yes, anything that spills on the grates turns dark as soon as it comes into contact with heat, but the stove was delivered with a Softscrub-like cleaner that takes the dark spots right off, and doesn't damage the porcelain on the grates. Use the stove, use the cleaner, be happy. If that doesn't appeal to you, there's no shortage of other great stoves out there.




Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 1200