Spiral mixer not incorporating all flour
Hello everyone, I’m new here. I’ve been reading info on here for a long time but this is the first time I’m out of my depth and couldn’t find a solution either here or elsewhere. I’ve been baking bread for about 14 years at home now and developed a nice sandwich loaf I really like. I recently moved from a standard Kitchenaid orbital mixer to a single speed(~150rpm)/ no reverse counter top spiral mixer. My intention was to scale everything up and maybe sell some to my small community. The last 2 mixes I’ve done in it have left small and medium sized chunks of unincorporated flour. This ain’t good. I’ve done probably about 20 runs in this machine to understand it more. Incorporating the flour and water usually isn’t a problem. I’ve done: all water in, some in now/some in late, autolyse, drizzle in, short mix, long mix, lean dough, and enriched dough. Could it be the flour? I’m not up on the tricks of using a spiral mixer yet
I put all the water in first, then add in the flour with the mixer running. I usually aim for 68% hydration at this point.
You should get a homogeneous mix with about 4 mins mixing; sometimes I stop the mixer every minute and scrape round the bottom corner of the bowl with a plastic spatula to ensure any dry bits are mixed in.
Your spiral speed is quite fast at 150rpm - I don't know if that's anything to do with it - I would be at 100rpm at this point.
Perhaps post your recipe - that might give us some clues.
Lance
It’s not an expensive machine. There are no speed selectors so it hard to gauge certain developments. I’m running a dough in it right now to try and figure something out. I might be adding in my extras too early
I think I added my “extras” in too early. Where I could add this immediately on my mix with the orbital mixture, I don’t think I left enough time to hydrate and knead the lean dough mix. I figured this by running another dough through it the same size just minus the mixins. I got the same chunks but let it keep kneading nd they disappeared.
When I moved to a larger KA I had the same problem - one thing I found helpful was to hold back on adding the salt in until I had mixed the dough for a few minutes. Adding the salt around the perimeter of the bowl seemed to help pick up the remaining flour.