Spiral Mixers

I am looking into buying a new mixer and am leaning towards picking up a spiral mixer. There have been a few threads on here about them in the past but they never seem to be super clear on what mixers are viable. I have gleaned that a 2 speed mixer is the minimum requirement but beyond that I am unsure what to look for. We make our dough with 25 lb bags of flours and about 15 lbs of water, so right around 41 to 42 lbs total dough weight with all ingredients. Can anybody offer some suggestions and even better some links of appropriate mixers for sale?

Clownhair;
PM me or contact me at thedoughdoctor@hotmail.com and I’ll be glad to discuss this for you. Additionally, I believe I wrote an article which addressed spiral mixers for PMQ, you might be able to find it in the archives.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor

LBC KM80P I believe is the model we bought. Love it so far. Just bought another for the other location. Minimum flour mixing is 25lbs. Maximum is 100lbs of flour. We got ours through Culinary Depot. Just be prepared for a lengthy wait. First one was 4-6 weeks. This time we’re waiting 8-10 weeks.

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i bought the LBC KM-80p and we have been super happy too. we bought based on accounts chronicled here and the fact that LBC is only 60 miles away and our 40 year old hobart was dead and a rush fix of the hobart would have cost the same as the LBC. and LBC could get us a mixer in 24 hours due to the proximity. also weighed in their favor that if there are ever parts needed we can hopefully get same day.

it is a chinese made mixer, so there is some concern looming that “you get what you pay for” but it’s seemingly robust where it needs to be and has pretty straight forward controls with manual override. in the limited research i’ve done, there are several brands all putting their sticker on the exact same machine and LBC was considerably cheaper than the others. might we have made another decision if we had the luxury of time and more research? maybe. is there a better price to performance spiral out there? not that i know of, at least not one that is supported in the us. no regrets for our needs at the time.

if you’re always using at the low end of the capacity, you might want to consider something smaller like a univex, but for our needs, it has saved us tremendous amounts of labor because we are mostly mixing batches at 80% of capacity. we are making 2 - 150# batches in the LBC instead of 6 - 60# batches in our hobart. that gave us the efficiency to finally buy a somerset rounder and any day now we will take delivery of the new somerset divider. this whole investment will turn a 6+hour dough shift into around a 2 hour dough shift. with our rapidly increasing minimum wages here, the $30,000 for all 3 pieces of equipment will pay for itself in a little more than 1 year. a total no brainer, no matter how you look at.

Daniel,

The 80P handles up to 100lbs of flour (not that well though from my experience. I spoke with LBC about this issue and they said with any mixer that size, the dough will form a “beard” around it. I find it more cumbersome to have to make that work back in). I’m thinking at doing 150lbs you got the 120P?

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sorry if my post wasn’t clear, we do 150# of dough, not flour. our formula has 91# of flour @ 60% hydration = 150# of dough which it handles without breaking a sweat. being an 80kilo (176#)capacity mixer, running at 80-85% capaity (140-150#) is the sweet spot. have never bothered trying larger but have not experienced anything i would consider a “beard” at the load we are running at.

Ah I see. I was wondering if that was possibly what you had meant. So you weigh out your flour for every batch exactly to 91#?

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do we weigh out 91# of flour? yes and no. our dough has a biga (preferment) and 3 types of flour. so we weigh everything for the biga which is all smaller bits (nothing in more than 10# increments), but when it comes to making the final dough, its 2 buckets of biga, a 50# bag of flour (not weighed) and a couple more smaller bits that are weighed. and we have a digital water meter for scaling the water.

Very interesting stuff! Glad the large batches work great for you. We any tweak our batches a bit to get that larger batch working for us

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