Cannot Get My Dough To Ball Up On My Hobart Mixer

[jim_wood]

Hello,
I have been hitting my head up against the wall for about a week on this and now im putting my ego aside and asking someone who I hope knows. I currently an owner/chef of a restaurant and we are opening a new concept with the emphasis on pizza, pasta etc. During research and development stages I used an old 3o quart Hobart mixer to come up with our dough. After many trial and error attempts I came up with a 68 percent hydration dough. Now that we are in the building and using a different mixer I am having a huge issue. The model mixer I have is a Hobart H 600 T. Im using a dough hook to mix it and I cannot get the dough to ball up. It just mixes with nothing happening. The only way I can get it to ball up is on 4 speed and that shakes the machine all over the floor so that clearly is not an option. At first I though maybe my hydration was too high and the dough was just sticking to the sides of the bowl. I took it all the way down to 60 just to see and the same problem, so I am thinking now its not an ingredient problem, but something with the equipment. Can anyone give me some insight on this one? I am opening soon and this is my only food related hang up at this point!

 

[Steve]

Hello,

I have been hitting my head up against the wall for about a week on this and now im putting my ego aside and asking someone who I hope knows. I currently an owner/chef of a restaurant and we are opening a new concept with the emphasis on pizza, pasta etc. During research and development stages I used an old 3o quart Hobart mixer to come up with our dough. After many trial and error attempts I came up with a 68 percent hydration dough. Now that we are in the building and using a different mixer I am having a huge issue. The model mixer I have is a Hobart H 600 T. Im using a dough hook to mix it and I cannot get the dough to ball up. It just mixes with nothing happening. The only way I can get it to ball up is on 4 speed and that shakes the machine all over the floor so that clearly is not an option. At first I though maybe my hydration was too high and the dough was just sticking to the sides of the bowl. I took it all the way down to 60 just to see and the same problem, so I am thinking now its not an ingredient problem, but something with the equipment. Can anyone give me some insight on this one? I am opening soon and this is my only food related hang up at this point!

I used to have a H600T. Good mixer, just was too small. We would mix on speed 1 for 2 minutes and 30 seconds, then add oil (should have no dry flour at this point). Mix on speed 2 for 6.5 minutes. We had a spiral hook. Is yours a J hook? Is it a 60qt bowl? Or is it actually an 80qt bowl?

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[durbancic]

A couple things it might be:
check to see that the hook is rotating the same way for both mixers. Sometimes the polarity can get switched when mixers get wired up and they do not mix quite right
check to see that the hook is close enough to the bottom of the bowl. If it is too far away it will not mix right. If you take off the stainless guard at the back of the lower part of the mixer there are some nuts (I believe) that you can turn to adjust how high the bowl comes up when you crank it up. Maybe the hook is too far away.

 

[Rico]

A couple things it might be:
check to see that the hook is rotating the same way for both mixers. Sometimes the polarity can get switched when mixers get wired up and they do not mix quite right
check to see that the hook is close enough to the bottom of the bowl. If it is too far away it will not mix right. If you take off the stainless guard at the back of the lower part of the mixer there are some nuts (I believe) that you can turn to adjust how high the bowl comes up when you crank it up. Maybe the hook is too far away.

I had this happen to me when I first opened the dough would just wrap around the hook and move up it and I constantly had to push the dough down the hook. It ended up being the first thing that durbancic said. The mixer was rotating in the wrong direction.