November 14, 2009 - 8:29am
hand mixer with dough hook
I am about to buy a hand mixer to aid my cake making. It seems that I can also get a dough hook with some models. I assume they are not meant for bread dough as such or are they? If I need to use the dough hook it will only be for 70% + hydration dough like ciabatta or pizza. Does anyone have experience with these dough hooks, are they useful at all?
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I have noticed that I can stick the hooks into the machine so that the tips point away or toward each other. I find mine work better when the tips are pointed to each other, then there is more action in the bowl.
The hooks are also good mixing flour into cookie dough.
Hand mixers really aren't designed for bread dough but like you said ciabatta or the first half of the mixing can be done with a mixer. (Which is the easy part anyway but if you have a handicap or injury, any help is welcome.) I've also noticed when it's held in the light weight stand that came with it, after a little beating and I add the salt, my mixer starts to buck. I don't use it much for breads but I'm not mixing lots of dough. I doubled a recipe recently and was quite surprised how bulky it was, but that would be too much dough even for a small mixer.
Mini
with the hand mixer is mixed. I've only used it once for bread, but here is my experience.
We visited our son and dil a couple weeks ago and I wanted to make pizza as well as baguettes. The baguettes were no problem. I just used my Danish dough whisk at the beginning then used the fold/rest method.
I did pizza two ways. First with just hand mixing till blended, autolyse, then fold/rest (about 5 times) till it was ready to shape. That was good pizza, although slightly different texture than the machine mixed one. The crumb texture was slightly more related to baguette than to ciabatta, but they all loved it.
Next time, I decided to use the dough hooks on their hand mixer. I mixed nearly forever, using the hooks and the batter beater. Nothing happened. The dough did not come together or take shape. I, finally, gave up and went back to fold/rest. The mixer held up okay through about a half hour of beating on and off, but it never got much of a result with the dough. Once I started the fold/rest, the dough began to take shape and we had a nice pizza.
My opinion is that, unless you get a pretty powerful hand mixer, I'd go with fold/rest even for wet dough. At home, I will still use my KA for the pizza dough most of the time.
Catherine
It'll take a powerful mixer to handle bread doughs efficiently. I have a Kitchen Aid 600 series (i think thats the product line), and if you take the speed past 2 with the dough hook attached its possible your machine might break down.
If you're doing high hydration doughs where you'd use stretch and fold anyway, theres not much point in using a stand mixer.
Thanks for all the comments. looks like adding dough hooks to hand mixers is a bit of an afterthought. I think I'll go for one without the dough hook.