The Best KitchenAid Attachments, Tested and Reviewed

Unless you have a butcher nearby, you may be used to getting your ground meats prepackaged. While that can work for most occasions, having your own food grinder attachment gives you access to freshly ground meat whenever you want, processed specifically to the coarseness you prefer. Testing it against other meat grinders in our lab, our main con was its smaller size: a narrow neck made it more difficult to push fattier meats, like pork, down to the auger. Most households don’t need a larger capacity, though, so it’s a great option for making a number of burger recipes, meatloaf, and sausage blends. It can also be used to grind hard cheeses and breads. The set has multiple grinding plate options, two sausage stuffer tubes, and a food pusher.

I most recently used my KitchenAid grinder attachment to make a pâté, which required coarsely ground pork and rabbit and finely ground chicken. While you have to pre-cut the pieces of meat and apply some pressure for the meat to feed through the grinder, the whole process was quick and easy, including cleaning. I just disassembled the metal parts and washed them with my favorite dish soap and warm water, then put the plastic parts in the top rack of the dishwasher. 

Material: Aluminum, Plastic | Cleaning: Hand wash only (food pusher, sausage parts, and cleaning brush are top-rack dishwasher safe)

This KitchenAid pasta roller and cutter attachment makes it possible to create fresh ravioli, lasagna, and noodles without having to dedicate additional space to a whole pasta machine. The set is made from stainless steel and includes a pasta roller that you can adjust to eight different thicknesses, plus two cutters for fettuccine and spaghetti. 

Compared to the hand-crank style of traditional pasta rollers, this attachment allows you to use both hands to feed fresh pasta dough through. In our pasta maker tests, we found that this attachment was one of the few that managed to consistently and completely cut through spaghetti and created distinct, even strands that stayed separated. We couldn’t find anything to complain about — even cleaning this attachment was fairly painless. Once we let remaining dough bits dry, we were able to just brush them off and polish the attachment with a clean, soft cloth. 

Material: Stainless Steel | Cleaning: Hand wash

While hand-crank and other manual spiralizers cost less, we much preferred using this KitchenAid attachment in our spiralizer tests — being able to leverage a machine for faster processing is worth it, if you ask us. This set comes with five interchangeable blades: medium and fine spiralizers, large and small slicing blades, and a peeling blade to help create zucchini noodles, curly fries, or peel pounds of apples for pie. If that’s not enough variety, a seven-blade set is available, offering an additional extra-fine spiralizer blade and thin-slice small core attachment. 

We used this attachment on fruits and vegetables of different textures, including apples, sweet potatoes, carrots, beets, zucchini, and squash. Whether it was peeling or spiralizing, we found its work clean and uniform. The attachment and blades were easy to clean by hand, but the blades can also go on the top rack of the dishwasher.

Material: Stainless Steel, aluminum | Cleaning: Blades are top-rack dishwasher safe, attachment body is hand wash only

Whether your favorite ice cream recipe is classic vanilla, peach-buttermilk, or rosewater-saffron, the flavor options are endless with this great-looking bowl attachment. Featuring an insulated freezer bowl and churning paddle, this attachment turns your KitchenAid mixer into an ice cream-maker capable of producing up to 2 quarts of ice cream or sorbet in around 20 to 30 minutes using the stir setting.

We found this attachment very intuitive to use in our ice cream maker tests. The bowl needs to be frozen for 16 hours before use, but once it’s ready to go, it’s simple to attach to a compatible stand mixer. Its construction also makes it easy to clean once it is at room temperature: While the bowl needs to be washed by hand, the dasher, drive assembly, and bowl adapter ring are top-rack dishwasher-safe.

Material: Stainless Steel | Dishwasher Safe: All parts except for bowl are top-rack dishwasher-safe

When temperatures are soaring, there are few things as refreshing as a snow cone or shaved ice. This dedicated shaved ice attachment eliminates the need for a standalone machine, generating over a pint of snow in just 60 seconds. The BPA-free attachment works with all KitchenAid stand mixer models, regardless of size or head style. It includes four ice molds which can be used to freeze any liquid you like, from plain water to lemonade or coffee. 

While we found this attachment very easy to use in our tests, one caveat is that it doesn’t have variable blade settings to adjust fineness, and the resulting ice is always snow cone-like in texture, with a little cruch, versus shave ice-like. It’s also limited to using molded ice, which means you’d have to pre-freeze a few ice blocks ahead of time if you’re planning on serving a crowd. With that being said, it delivers a consistent result with minimal effort, aside from prepping the molded ice beforehand: a great feature to have for a kid’s birthday or poolside party.

Material: BPA-free Plastic | Cleaning: Dishwasher safe, except for housing, which should be wiped down by hand