Choosing The Right Dough Mixer For Your Restaurant
No one can argue the importance of the mixer in the restaurant industry. It is a staple piece of equipment for many commercial kitchens, from the pizzeria preparing fresh dough to the burger joint that mixes its own sauce. When choosing your mixer, be it for whipping up your famous dough, batter, condiment or sauce, it is very important to get the right one for the job. The wrong investment can wreak havoc on your budget and on the quality of your products as well.
The smallest commercial mixers you can find are countertop mixers, sometimes called bench mixers, and as their name suggests, they ought to be placed on a countertop, work table, or special mixer table. These types of mixers are called planetary mixers, the reason for their name being the way their agitators spin on their axis while the hub rotates around the circumference of the bowl. It all looks a lot like a planet spinning around its axis while orbiting the sun. Even though small, this type is still a professional dough mixer and it can come with a wide range of interchangeable agitators such as mixing paddles, wire whips, and dough hooks. They are great for making fresh mayonnaise and mixing pancake batter.
If your establishment requires a larger mixer for mixing larger batches at once, you should go for a floor mixer. They are designed to sit on the floor of your kitchen, with some models reaching up to 1.5 meters, with a wide base purposefully made to keep it stable while operating as these mixers can mix up to 50 kg of dough at once. This type of professional dough mixer is best suited for large bakeries and pizzerias that need to produce large quantities of dough daily. Because of their large capacity, many of them come with a bowl truck, the purpose of which is to assist in putting the bowl in place. These types of mixers usually use the spiral mixing method which differs from the planetary mixer as the agitator spins in place while the bowl rotates to create the mixture. They are usually the better choice when you need to achieve denser texture.
There is great number of accessories that could go along with your mixer and help you get the most out of it, but you should be careful and make sure you are using the right agitator for each task. Some of the standard accessories that come along with any mixers are: a stainless steel bowl, a bowl extender, a flat beater, a wing whip and a wire whip.
