i am looking for recommendation for spiral mixer for my pizzeria. for 20 years we have used a hobart 60qt mixer (now over 40 years old) which may have just bit the dust and might not be worth fixing.
we make 80-320lb of dough per day. we only use our mixer for dough so thinking of switching to spiral mixer. i think a sweet spot size mixer would be a mixer that could handle loads as big as 80k / 175lb per batch.
looking for recommendations of brands that known to be workhorse mixers and are well supported in the us.
I just purchased an LBC 80T. It can do up to 110lbs of flour. Haven’t received it but @pizzapiratespp swayed me in this direction. Very affordable. We got ours from Culinary Depot for $5980.
thanks steve. i saw a fair bit of LBC mentions in the forums. i think they are a spin-off company of lang. and i think our roll-in proofer is theirs. they just happen to be about 50 miles from me, so we’re going down tomorrow morning to test it in person.
I believe Lang and ABS are partnered to some degree. The lbc 50 would probably do well for you. We used that size at the store level for years. It handles 1 50 lb bag of flour creating a 80lb (or so) batch of dough in 5 to 7 minutes. It comes out of the mixer fairly easily. One average strength male can pull it out in 1 swoop. Follow Toms tips on the process and you will be happy.
We use a bigger one now ( the 120 ) 3 bags of flour at a time. We do around 2000 lbs a day and it never quits.
Glad to see you found one. Although I gave you my vendor info, I really would not recommend them for an item that small. They focus on industrial operations and are a bit annoyed be me and my small orders. They built the Domino’s commissary here in SoCal.
I was hoping finding someone closer to me would help get it here faster, but it still ships from Washington State even though Culinary Depot is out of NY. 2 Weeks until we have it
well… went down to LBC’s office and demo kitchen and tried out the KM-80P, the pizza model variant of the 80T w/ same design and motor, but slightly tweaked torque, rpm and miniscule difference in hook clearance. never used a spiral mixer before but we mixed a double batch of our current dough, 85# total and it handled it with ease and it should be able to handle double that. we also made a 18# batch testing it’s low end functionality and seemed to handle that as well, but would probably need additional mixing time because the way the dough got lost in the big bowl to some extent.
to answer my own question about ABS, first requires an explanation about LBC. LBC, formerly Lang Bakery Company is now owned by SINMAG. SINMAG makes the LBC models and the ABS models. all interchangeable parts and similar controls but some changes to case and as described above, some change to the “tuning”.
anyway, was sufficiently pleased with the results and due to the lack of any other option, it was a very easy decision… terrific value, in stock locally and most importantly, serviced locally. gears are in motion to buy one and hopefully have it delivered by the weekend so we don’t have to make dough in our 20qt any longer than we need to.
thanks all for your advice here and in the other threads.
and now that we’ll be able to make all our day’s dough, even on the busiest of days in 2 batches, it may finally make sense to buy a divider rounder. i went down to pizza equipment pro’s in bay area 6mo ago and tried out the friul divider/rounder with our dough and was more or less pleased with the results. it’s a very compact but capable machine. the balls weren’t as taught as a hand rolled ball, but i didn’t hold on to any when we left to see how they performed after overnight fermentation, but i think for pizza it would be just fine. alternately maybe just a rounder with a built in table catcher like the AM Mfg R900T with rotating table and just continue to hand scale the balls. the idea of the fruil being able to bust through a day’s dough needs in an hour instead of 4 is very appealing tho. anyone out there with a Friul divider rounder? anyone used both Friul and AM mfg? (cross posting this into new thread)
You would probably find the the divider overkill for a 1 store operation. The rounder is an excellent value though. You definitely want the table turner one. They are fast and take 5 minutes to clean. Every once in while they spit out a bad doughball but just toss it in again and it’s perfect.
loving it! very noticeable improvement in dough. now want a 10 or 15kg spiral for home baking. probably gonna get a Famag 10kg(w/tilting head and removable bowl) or Sunmix 15kg.
I can’t believe there’s not a better way of tilting these things other than lifting the entire mixer. You would think somebody would have engineered some sort of detachable tilting bowl by now.
we changed a few things from a production standpoint to gain the advantage and efficiency of the larger batch size. simply multiplying made things awkward. we use a pre-ferment (biga) which we used to mix in the mixer, but reformulated to be higher hydration and mixed with a paddle in their buckets. we re-jiggered the formula to where a full batch now uses a full 50# batch of flour (one less thing to measure), other smaller ingredients and 2 buckets of the biga preferment and water from our water meter, making for a 150# batch. this new formula is also easily scaled down to a half batch, both sizes being in the mixer’s “sweet spot”. we have successfully mixed one dough as little as 20#, being below the sweet spot, which just meant it needed extra time as the hook wasn’t in contact with the dough blob for most of the bowl’s rotation. we also took the opportunity to up the overall hydration from 56% to 60%, something that have wanted to do, but changing one thing in a formula that had years of muscle memory for the dough guys was hard to do, but since everything was new to learn, it was a good time to make little tweaks.
we had some tweaking to do to the mix time. original mix time in hobart was 10 min on speed 1. initial mix time on spiral was 30 sec on reverse to incorporate ingredients, 2 min on speed 1, and 6 min on speed 2. we were experiencing some tearing of skin on on some balls, my thinking was that it was a little over developed and that we’d knock the mix time down by 30 sec or 1 min , but it ended up actually needing 1 min more mix time.
one glitch we encountered at our demo (and they and we both caught) was that in speed 2 the bowl went the correct direction but the hook was going the reverse direction. had something to do with the 3phase wiring and was easily corrected (by them) by changing the jumping of some internal wiring. we were wondering why it was taking so long for the dough to develop and dough was also riding up on the hook constantly. we initially thought our dough wasn’t suited for speed 2. they corrected that before delivery and has been flawless since.
i am so thankful to this group to steering me to LBC. i had forgotten that they were in our backyard and when our hobart died and we had to scramble, research new mixers in an afternoon, them having the model we needed in stock, taking a field trip down there the next day to learn more and try the mixer with our formula, arrange to buy the mixer and pick it up and install it the following day, all went flawlessly. the whole thing couldn’t have turned out any better. if i had all the time in the world to research mixers, mayyybee would have made a different decision, but likely would have ended up in the same place. from what i have learned in my research here, the web and some at pizza expo, the LBC hit all the right marks and the price is very good value. so, i’m very happy with the purchase and my interactions with them.
Anyone that has the LBC Mixer, did you install an “Air Circuit Breaker” like the manual says you should do? We just got ours delivered today and it’s getting installed Saturday. (Old mixer is single phase, this is three phase)