How to use dough in food processors and stand mixers & not strain the appliance
Mariana's method of developing gluten in a food processor is so interesting. It has got me playing with whizzing dough in my old food processor.
However, it isn't all roses. My food processor is old (and is only 400W) and can't really handle it - I got to about 30 seconds of mixing with a 60% hydration dough (450g flour + 270g water) made with that W160 Italian flour and started to get black smoke coming out of my food processor! Luckily it still works, but it does smell like bad incense now, and probably won't last for all that long.
This got set me thinking as to what we can do when using our appliances when we're working with dough to lessen the strain on the machine.
My thoughts were, the obvious thing is to use a smaller mass of dough and to combine afterwards. Or to work with less stiff dough, but the tricky bit is to not overhydrate just to make it easier on the appliance.
For the food processor I thought it might be an option to pulse for 10 seconds then leave to rest for a minute, and repeat the cycle.
It is similar for stand mixers too. My 'very vintage' Kenwood had some documentation somewhere with a maximum dough weight to use (think it was 1.3kg), so I don't normally go above 500-550g of flour. Plus, I've also seen pictures on the internet of a card with the different recommended speeds for the different attachments, and if I recall the maximum speed for dough was listed as 2, and on that basis I haven't actually run it faster than that. It only has a 450W motor, but think the centrifugal speed control gives it some benefits when handling the extra strain.
What strategies work for the bakers here, who use home equipment? I guess the other alternative is to just buy beefier machinery, or lots of cheap old machines and replace them as they die!
of your food proc?
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An oft-cited book on mixing dough in a food proc is "The Best Bread Ever" by Charles van Over.
In it he recommends a minimum 11 cup capacity for 500 grams of white flour at 63% hydration -- pages 18 and 50.
Hard to know how many cups but think it is about 1.25l so only about 5 cups.
Thanks Dave for the Charles van Over information, it is turning into a very interesting rabbit hole. 🐇
Well, there's the answer. Assuming a straight-line relationship, your max capacity would be (5/11)*500 = 227 grams of white flour. And that also assumes your particular brand is as well built as what van Over recommended.
He also mentions mixing for just 45 seconds, on page 20.
Jon, I consulted "Bread in Half the Time" published in 1991 when kneading in Cuisinart food processors was explored for the first time in the eighties, and they say that the rule is to take the size of the food processor bowl in cups and halve it. The resulting number is how many cups of SIFTED flour your FP would be able to handle.
So, for your FP with its 5 cup bowl it would be about 2:cups (to err on the safer side) of sifted flour (about 220-250g of flour max) kneading for about 1 min at a time, letting both the machine and dough cool in between, if necessary.
To be very safe, you can halve even that amount and knead smaller chunks of dough and then lump them together outside the FP, on the table.
My Cuisinart is big, theoretically it could handle 8 cups of flour, full 2lbs, but I never use it for more than 500-600g of flour at a time and sometimes I halve even that amount, because it would be quicker that way.
This is great information, at least I think I've got an idea that they way to go is to just use a smaller mass of dough.
I do love my Kenwood mixer, but there is something about using the food processor that is attractive to me and I do want to explore it further. I suppose it doesn't really matter if you build the gluten more slowly in a mixer than a FP, but I don't really know yet what the difference will be. Perhaps I'll find that it works best with certain flours. It is all an exciting reading and learning adventure right now.
And, I guess once I find that I do enjoy it then it'll be a good motivation to look at getting hold of a Cuisinart, or Bosch which seem to have better prices and more watts to their models.