Review: Ooni Halo Pro Spiral Mixer

When I got married 14 years ago, my three high school best friends pooled together and bought me a KitchenAid stand mixer. It’s a beautiful heirloom, and I think about my friends whenever I’ve made batches of chocolate chip cookies over the years. Like most home stand mixers, it’s a planetary mixer—the blades rotate around a fixed point. Properly cared for, a nice planetary mixer will last forever.

But it often doesn’t feel like it when you’re making 4,000 batches of pizza dough and clinging to the top of your rapidly overheating KitchenAid to prevent the dough hook from slapping the dough ball to the side with enough force to knock it over. If you’re making a lot of bread dough or stiff dough, you should look into a spiral mixer, which commercial bakers use. In this mixer, the bowl rotates around a fixed spinning blade.

Having revolutionized the home pizza oven industry, Ooni turned its sights on making the commercial-inspired spiral mixer essential home equipment. I hate to say this about a piece of kitchen equipment that costs $799, but it’s going to be hard to go back to my KitchenAid. I have spent two months using the Ooni Halo Pro to make baked goods, and it’s a little bit life-changing.

Bigger and Better

The Halo Pro is beautiful. Unboxed, it takes up about the same amount of counter space as my KitchenAid. It's about 6.5 inches wide, 14 inches deep, and 12.5 inches tall. It comes in two colors: white or glossy black.

Along with the clear plastic bowl cover, it comes with several accessories, like the spiral dough hook, a removable breaker bar to keep the dough from riding up in the bowl, a whisk, and a beater with flexible rubber edges for creaming while making cookies and cakes. It also has a plastic cover to keep your dry ingredients from faffing around in the air.

The steel bowl has a 7.3-quart capacity, almost twice the KitchenAid’s 4.5-quart capacity. The mixer’s arm, so to speak, lifts up and down with two buttons to remove the bowl for easier cleaning. This is the first spiral mixer I’ve used, but the bowl and the accessories are beautiful and solid enough to stand alone as pieces of sculpture.

They click solidly and easily into place, and I’m not worried that they will fall out or break with use. I had to take the spiral mixer attachment away from my 7-year-old, who was about to take off with it as a toy.

A dial on the top with two glowing touch buttons lets you control both the speed of the attachment and bowl, as well as an automatic timer. The operation is astoundingly simple. Within a day or two, my 10-year-old was operating the mixer as well as I could.

Your New Baking Friend

If your childhood best friends also chipped in to buy you an heirloom KitchenAid mixer, I now apologize to you and them when I say that using a commercial spiral mixer is much easier and better. There’s a reason why professional bakers use commercial mixers instead of adorable, heirloom planetary mixers.

Over a few weeks, I tested each attachment and operation. I used the dough hook to make pizza dough, from two separate recipes, and several batches of shokupan. I used the beater to make chocolate chip cookies and blueberry muffins. I also used the whisk to make whipped cream.

A 7.3-quart bowl is massive. If you’re not a commercial baker, most standard recipes you might find in The New York Times Cooking app or my bible, The King Arthur Baking Companion, might get lost in it. However, this increased capacity made me so, so happy. If I invite another family of four for a homemade pizza party, I'll need to make at least 12 pizza doughs in advance. (The kids will want to make their own, someone will drop or burn another, or put moldy trout as a topping, et cetera. You have to plan ahead!) Ooni’s dough recipe makes four doughs in three separate batches, which takes all afternoon. With the Halo Pro, I can easily double it. Bam! I get my afternoon back!

The Halo Pro is much quieter, and the motor does not overheat; I don’t get the sense that the motor is straining to knead the dough. There’s also—sorry, I don’t know how else to describe this—no violent thwapping of dough as it’s being kneaded. Unlike a KitchenAid, you can leave it unattended. This is so easy that I ruined not one but two batches of shokupan with over-kneading before I realized what was happening.

Being able to more precisely calibrate the speed of the mixing with a dial instead of the KitchenAid’s five settings helped. You can knead it much slower and treat it more gently with a dial and a spiral mixer than with a KitchenAid.

I also love the Halo Pro’s flexible paddle, which is much better than the KitchenAid flat paddle. It fits perfectly against the bowl’s sides, which means you can put even the smallest amounts of softened butter and sugar in the bowl, and the paddle will cream them perfectly. No stopping every few seconds to lift the arm and scrape the sides with a separate spatula, although you will probably feel the need to do that anyway. I’ve only had this mixer since February, so I can’t vouch for the paddle’s long-term durability, but it seems to be holding up well.

Finally, there is even a light inside, so you don’t have to have the mixer perfectly positioned in your kitchen to check if your chocolate chips have been well distributed in the dough.

Mucho Gusto

As you may have guessed, getting a commercial stand mixer is mostly about volume. If you’re a bread baker who wants to improve your one or two weekly loaves for your family, there are cheaper and easier things you can do that would have a much better effect before you invest in one of these. (For those tips, I refer you to Ken Forkish’s book Flour Water Salt Yeast, which my colleague Kat Merck edited and recipe-tested.)

The Halo Pro’s main competitor is the Ankarsrum stand mixer. It is beautiful and has the same retro aesthetic as the KitchenAid, if that’s your thing. The Halo Pro has better specs in some regards. For example, I got the Halo Pro up to 345 revolutions per minute versus the Ankarsrum’s measly 130 rpm. The Halo Pro has the interior light and the flexible paddle, which I liked quite a bit.

The major downside has to do with why people buy KitchenAids: You know they'll last a lifetime, and maybe several. No matter how great any spiral mixer is, it's hard to stand up against that kind of well-known guarantee. But if you’re like me, and you like entertaining in a carby, chaotic way—pizza! Pretzels! Cinnamon rolls!—getting a bigger spiral mixer is worth it. No more worrying about making multiple batches, or overheating, or having to babysit your dough. It's also convenient for whipping up little batches of this or that in the mornings, too.