December 17, 2012 - 10:12am
Inadequate kneading in kitchen-aid?
Hello ! Kneading problem: When I use my KA to knead the bread, (speed 2) the dough climbs up the dough hook with a small attachment of dough at the bottom of the bowl after only a couple of minutes. I know this is not sufficient for proper gluten development. Question: Is the dough still getting kneaded properly while wrapped around the hook? I scrape it down, but it climbs up again in a minute or two. Same thing happens with the paddle. Result: Breads all fall apart after baking when I try to slice. Thanks for your help.
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I have a similar issue and what I found from other posts on this site, is that a little spray vegetable oil on the underside/base of the hook helps, otherwise, I just stop the machine, push the dough off the hook with wet hands and continue on, being sure to note to add extra kneading time in the machine to make up for the stop. Hope this helps.
Thanks, I will try the oil.
Search stretch and folds on this site. You will save yourself some grief and develop gluten nicely taking this approach. Then you won't even worry about developing gluten in your mixer and instead using the stretch and fold technique. It's better than machine mixing. Maybe one day they'll come up with a spiral mixing attatchment for these mixers making their machines that much more versatile.
Josh
Thank you Josh. I read about that in BBA, and it seemed too easy to be true! I will re-visit this technique.
If you get the new spiral hook the dough rises up the hook and falls back into the bowl. The older "C" hook doesn't work as good for kneading. Hope it helps
I just contacted kitchenaid and they say the new spiral hook will not work on my old tilt head mixer, only on the newer bowl lift models. RATS!
They tend to say things like that. When a few years back an aftermarket paddle with silicone side showed up they were all up in arms about how this will ruin the mixer. Of course now they make of their own, $10 more expensive if I am not mistaken. Bottom line is you have check yourself.
To my Hobart-built KA I added a spiral dough hook. (KitchenAid does not recommend this attachment except on their more high end models and then only on speeds 1 and 2.)
The direction of rotation combined with the direction of the spiral drives the dough downward into the bowl so their is no wide disk at the top to keep the dough out of the motor housing. Mixing mostly doughs hydrated at 69% and above I found that they developed well and passed window-pane tests more quickly than with the C-hook—and both the dough and the motor housing got heated up less in the process.
However...dramatic pause for effect...mixing a stiff dough (one of Reinhart's struans) with the spiral hook one day was punctuated by discouraging gear clashing noises which we traced to a tooth (one of 59) broken from the ring gear. Having replaced the ring gear I would rather use the spiral hook again than fight the climbing dough, but wouldn't risk it with stiffer mixes. This is in spite of how hard it was to find the replacement ring gear (aka internal gear): a wonderfuly persistent telephone contact named Nikki at Marcone came through for us.
I just turned the speed up to 3 and the dough flings off.
I found that I had to go to a higher speed. And to reduce the stress on the gears I increased the hydration. The result was better bread. I eventually went back to the paddle and kept mixing at speed 3. I found that 5 min was enough for 1500 g of 75% hydration dough. There is a hydration boundary below which using the paddle will overstress the gear train.
What amount of dough (weight) are you kneading?
I have a tilt-head KA as well, I find the dough climbs the C-hook badly when the bowl is overloaded. It's pretty easy to add too much dough to a 5qt bowl. Somewhere between 1500-2000g of dough, it climbs a C-hook badly, regardless of whether it's a stiff bagel dough or a slack, sticky rye. If you keep the dough you're kneading to less than 1500g, it shouldn't climb. If you need to do a big batch, knead it in batches, then re-combine by incorporating some stretch-n-folds at the end.
As others have mentioned, increasing speed also can help. For intensive kneading, I mix at KA speed #4. But generally, I have found climbing in my KA less related to speed and more related to bowl capacity and dough weight.
Hello, actually I'm only using a small amount of dough, just enough for one loaf. But I have turned up the speed and spray oiled the hook as suggested, and all this is helping a lot. As for my core problem of the bread falling apart, I have discovered that it is not entirely due to this hook-kneading issue. I am a defiant "non-recipe follower" and fortune favors the idiot sometimes! I was adding a tablespoon of yeast to my single loaf recipies (more is better, right? faster rising?). Well, I live at 7500 feet in the mountains, and yesterday I ran out of yeast and only had about 1 & 1/2 tsp in the jar to use. Secondly, I had the B&T proofer set at 85 deg. (warmer is better right? ). Well, I was in a hurry to get the loaf baked for dinner and took it out of the proofer when it was barely at the top of the loaf pan instead of the usual 3-4 inches over. Summary: Bread did not fall apart when sliced! I was under-kneading, over yeasting and over proofing. And to add more fortune to this event, the phone rang and I did not slice the bread the minute it came out of the oven as usual. Does TFL give out awards for people who finally learn their lesson and follow directions?
I'm glad it all worked out and you now have a system that works! Yay! Keep on baking, you'll get better and better results!
Don't you love it that bread is so forgiving.
Yes! and the fall-apart slices on my mistakes were made into seasoned bread crumbs! This is the best ever website for help from people who've "been there". I just love it! Thanks again everyone.