The 5 Best Stand Mixers and Attachments of 2026

KitchenAid has a catalog of 37 proprietary attachments that can exponentially increase the versatility of your machine. Some attachments can even open the door to culinary hobbies, like making sausage or pasta from scratch.

But not all of the company’s attachments are worth the cupboard space. And with prices ranging from $50 to $250, they’re not always the cheapest way to achieve your goal.

We looked for attachments that are versatile and useful enough to warrant the storage room and price. After testing nine of the most promising ones, we recommend three.

Better sausage and burgers: KitchenAid Metal Food Grinder Attachment

Top pick

Consider this if you frequently cook with ground meat and want to control its quality.

Grinding your own meat lets you control exactly what goes into your blends, and KitchenAid’s Metal Food Grinder Attachment makes this process swift and easy. While a standalone meat grinder costs about the same price, it typically takes up more space to do the same work as this attachment.

You can customize the coarseness. The attachment comes with three different grinding plates, providing more-precise textures than a food processor. We’ve used the largest die to chop a steak for tartare and the medium to grind pork and beef together for meatballs; we’ve been happy with our results.

It’s easy to chill. Since all of the parts are metal except for the sausage-stuffing nozzle, you can chill the whole attachment in the freezer to keep whatever you’re grinding as cold as possible; this keeps the meat firm during processing.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

It leaves about an ounce of meat scraps that don’t get pushed through the die. But here’s a chef’s trick you can use: Scrunch some plastic wrap into a strip and drop it into the hopper behind the last bit of meat. It will wind through the gear and push the meat through, leaving the plastic behind, neatly wrapped around the auger.

Fresh pasta on a whim: KitchenAid Pasta Roller

Top pick

This attachment offers as good an experience as you could ask for, and it’s a step above manual-crank machines.

Silky, fresh pasta made from scratch is well worth the effort. The KitchenAid Pasta Roller is smaller and much easier to use than a standalone hand-crank pasta machine.

It’s simpler to use than a hand-crank maker. If you’re working alone using a hand-crank machine, it can be hard to coordinate your actions while rolling out the pasta dough again and again. This attachment simplifies the job of making pasta sheets by automating the roller, which frees your other hand to focus on guiding the pasta dough through.

Even accounting for a 30-minute rest time, you can have fresh pasta in about an hour using this attachment (with some practice). You can also roll thinner pasta sheets than you would by hand, with much less skill required. And even with tougher, bread-flour-based doughs, we’ve found this machine easier to use than hand-rolling or cranking.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

It’s noisier than a manual roller. But it’s a small price to pay to be able to have your hands free to control the pasta dough.

The steel roller is prone to rusting and shouldn’t be cleaned with water. That’s something most pasta rollers have in common, though. For maintenance, all you have to do is use the included brush to dust any excess flour off the rollers after using. KitchenAid also recommends greasing the roller with mineral oil every 50 or so uses to prevent rust and maintain optimal function.

Shaved ice in an instant: KitchenAid Shave Ice Attachment

Top pick

You can make a couple servings of shaved ice in under 30 seconds with this attachment. It’s a bit of a splurge but great if you want a fun, easy treat for kids or if you like to entertain.

If you yearned for a Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine as a child (or if you were disappointed by the clunky, laborious reality of using that device), the KitchenAid Shave Ice Attachment may finally fulfill your snow cone fantasies. It makes good shaved ice lightning fast, and you can also use it to make an instant granita with frozen juice or coffee.

The design is intuitive. To use the attachment, freeze 6 ounces of any liquid in each of the four included cylindrical molds. After you choose either the coarse or fine blade, pop a puck of ice out of its mold, insert it into the machine, and crank your mixer up to high.

It grinds quickly, no elbow grease needed. In less than 30 seconds, you can have a mound of shaved ice big enough to serve one or two people — about 2 cups total.

The fine blade is especially great. It’s the one we’d choose most of the time, as it shaves plain ice into a fluffy texture with a bit of crunch. The result is not as soft and snow-like as, say, Japanese kakigori, but it’s still pleasant to eat and soaks up syrup well.

The course blade has its uses, too. While it produces something a little too crunchy to be entirely pleasant to eat, its yield would work great in a cocktail that requires crushed ice or as a bed for raw oysters.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

This attachment doesn’t work with regular ice cubes. You have to use the special ice molds included, and you are somewhat limited by the number of ice molds that come with the machine (four). But if you make ice in the molds, toss the frozen cubes in a storage bag, and then immediately refill the molds, over time you’ll build up a stash of ice pucks ready to shave.

KitchenAid also sells a set of four molds separately for $25, so you can supplement your supply (or replace molds if they crack).