All Great Baking Starts With Your Mixer

All Great Baking Starts With Your Mixer

If you're baking Cakes, Pastries or making Pizzas, then your Oven would be considered your most important piece of equipment. Yet none of these products would even reach the oven without your mixer.

All these delicious products start their journey in the mixing bowl.

Paramount BM20ATS 20 Litre Planetary Mixer as seen & used in Masterchef Season 8 Episode 19

So selecting the right mixer for your business plays a key role in producing consistent, high-quality products.

Cake mixes and dough mixes require different types of mixers. So getting the right mixer will increase your efficiency and reduce your maintenance costs.

So how do choice right mixer for your business?

You have 2 main Options, the Planetary and Spiral Mixers

Eenie Meenie Miney Mo

You could just go "Eenie Meenie Miney Mo" but this is not that helpful.

So you need to ask some questions to determine the best mixer for your commercial kitchen.

How To Choose the Right Mixer

1.) What are you planning to mix?

Different types of dough and batter, have different consistencies. So you need to get the right mixer for the right job.

If you're kneading a batch of thick, stiff dough then it's going to require more power than mixing meringue or icing.

So a bread mixer and pizza dough mixer will be different than a mixer meant for whipping delicate egg whites.

A good way of working this out for your most commonly used dough is using the absorption ratio AR. (% Absorption Ratio) = Water weight divided by flour weight.

The drier the dough, the tougher it is to mix, and so it's going to affect how large a batch you can mix according to the size of your mixer.

To calculate the AR, divide the water weight by the flour weight. So if you have. 10 litres = 10kg. of water and 25 kg. of flour equals a 40% (0.4) AR. The lower the AR, the stiffer and more difficult to mix the dough so the smaller the batch will need to be.

So the lower the absorption rate, the more difficult the dough will be to mix so you will need a mixer with more power.

2.) How often do you expect to use your mixer?

Will you be using this every day or only occasionally?

It goes with saying these Mixers are designed to handle the rigours of a commercial kitchen. But you still need to make sure you get the right mixer to get the results you want.

3.) What quantities will you be mixing? How much you will be mixing plays a large role in what size of mixer you will need.

How much space do you have? Where are you going to use the mixer in your kitchen? The Size of the mixer will determine where you can place the mixer.

Make sure you check both your product range and production volume.

You'll need to consider how big you want your mixer to be.

Leave yourself some extra capacity. Some products expand when agitated in the mixing process. Which can leave a mess if you've completely filled the mixing bowl.

You may need to make larger batches of whatever you're mixing in the future as your business grows.

Don't fill the bowl to the brim, and different ingredient factors will affect how big each batch can be:

A small restaurant can take care of most needs with a 10 - 30 Litre planetary mixer.

A Pizzeria or bakery should look at getting a 40 - 60 Litre. or larger, or even a spiral mixer in large-scale applications. This is because the mixer is in constant use, turning out high volumes of product.

So you may have guessed, there is no one-size-fits-all mixing solution.

So selecting the right mixer requires an intimate knowledge of your product and your production needs.

This why you should Work with a qualified equipment company like SCK, so you will get the perfect fit for your mixing needs. Because great baking starts with the right mixer!

Planetary Mixer

Paramount BM20ATS 20 Litre Planetary Mixer

A planetary mixer (aka Vertical Mixer) gets its name because an agitator turns on an offset shaft, while the mixing bowl remains stationary. This motion is like the way the planets move around the sun.

They have a variety of interchangeable agitator attachments so you can mix anything from dough to icing to meringues and puddings.

You can usually mix smaller batches by using a smaller mixing bowl

Planetary mixers are measured by bowl size, usually in Litres.

The planetary mixer is ideal if you need your mixer to perform more tasks than mixing dough or your kitchen has lower-volume output.

Planetary mixers also have variable speeds, complimenting their attachments, such as paddles, whips, and dough hooks.

The planetary mixer has the ability to support multiple attachments.

• Dough Hook for kneading bread dough's, cakes, pizzas, croissants, cookies, etc...
• Mixing paddle for mixing creams, masses of Genoese, cakes, etc....
• Whisk for beating egg whites, whipped cream, meringues, mayonnaise, soft creams, etc...

Spiral Mixer

Paramount SM-50TW - Spiral Mixer - 50kg

Spiral Mixers (aka known as Dough mixers) consist of a spiral-shaped agitator that remains stationary, while the bowl revolves around it. This specialised design makes them great for mixing large quantities of dough at a time.

They don't have a variety of agitator attachments like a planetary mixer, but can mix high volumes of dough much quicker.

Spiral mixers work exclusively with dough, so they are measured by how much dough they can make.

Unlike a planetary mixer, you do not need to change the bowl or agitator when mixing smaller batches.

Spiral mixers have one job in the pizzeria kitchen: mixing dough. But what they lack in versatility, they make up for in speed and quality.

Spiral mixers are ideal for high-volume pizzerias.

If your pizzeria doesn't currently do high-volume. then you would be wise to look at your potential future growth when choosing a mixer.

So selecting the right mixer requires an intimate knowledge of your product and your production needs.

This why you should Work with a qualified equipment company like SCK, so you will get the perfect fit for your mixing needs. Because great baking starts with the right mixer!

Get the Paramount BM20ATS 20 Litre Planetary Mixer as seen and used in the latest Masterchef series it's readily available and very affordable.

Check out the Masterchef Bundle price for the Paramount Mixers

Skip all the hard work and get the right equipment Restaurant or Commercial Kitchen

If you would like to find out more about Restaurant Equipment for your food business then please choose from one of these options: