June 4, 2022 - 4:58pm
Sweet Dough Paddle?
Has anyone used a Hobart Sweet Dough Paddle or know of a video of it in use? (Sometimes referred to as a folding paddle)
Beyond photos or the odd eBay listings, I can't seem to find any reference to them in use or how well they function.
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Hi, this is called flat beater,
it is used for combining, folding and creaming ingredients, making cookie dough, cake dough, muffin dough, soda bread dough, batters, high percent rye bread dough, gluten free bread dough, mashed potatoes, etc. Anything that does not require whipping on high speed or gluten development (kneading). Basically, if by hand you would use a rubber spatula or a spoon to mix something, then in a mixer you would use this attachment.
Usually used on low or medium speed. Any tutorial on flat beaters would work for this particular configuration.
It's beautiful! Looks very antique.
mariana thanks for the reply.
These sweet dough attachments apparently act very differently to a flat beater.
Just as with a pastry knife, the missing inner struts mean the beater moves the dough in a fundamentally different way to a normal flat beater.
Actually, it is even sold as a genuine flat beater!
Flat beaters come in many configurations, some are empty, others have a number of rods inside, like yours.
The point is that they are in between a single thick rod (a hook or a spiral needed to pull and stretch gluten and to give it turns) and a whisk (many thin rods in different configurations - elongated, balloonlike, etc)
Yes, it is flat, but as I understand, these are specifically designed to develop gluten in high hydration and sweet doughs on a planetary mixer. Spiral dough hooks on planetary mixers are known for having difficulty with high hydration doughs - why they are so often discussed as the domain of spiral and dual-arm mixers.
If so, this is where they differ to the purpose of most flat beaters as you describe in your first reply post. "Anything that does not require whipping on high speed or gluten development"
The void in the centre holds most of the dough (so it does not over mix) and the edge tyne stretches small amounts of dough between the edge of the bowl. Once enough gluten forms the tynes then work very similarly to a spiral mixer on the ball of dough.
I can't imagine developing gluten with a whisk or a paddle, not even with a pastry knife (Hobarts's or Bosch's "empty" flat paddle) but maybe you will be able to. Experiment with it, I would love to see it work for you, of course.
We had a Hobart mixer in our restaurant in Montreal and my very first home mixer was KA professional series. "Sweet" dough in this flat beater's description refers to cookie and cake doughs, not to a pannetone or Danish dough, for example. It is impossible to knead and develop a batch of pannetone dough with a flat beater of any configiration.
Generally speaking, there are so many different strategies to mix a batch of dough with or without gluten development that a chosen method may depend on one or several attachments in the same mixer. Some stages of mixing might require an attachment for whipping the liquid phase another - for folding or kneading the soft or stiff phase.
Time needed to develop gluten depends on the strategy and on the flour (or flour mix) used and on the overall formula which indicates the stage of gluten development. Obviously it takes less time to give dough 600 turns in a mixer (to achieve the initial stage of gluten development as for the baguette dough) than 900-1200 turns (medium stage) or 1800-2000 turns (maximum gluten development as in sandwich bread or burger buns dough).
High hydration doughs that require gluten development as in ciabatta, pinsa or focaccia dough for example are usually mixed in two steps. First, a stiffer dough is mixed and kneaded to the desired stage of gluten development with a hook or a spiral attachment, then the remaining water is slowly added as you continue to knead it. These are stages for pinsa romana dough mixing in a two-speed mixer, for example
1) Pour 80% of the water and mix at speed 1 until the flour and the yeast is well mixed, then switch to speed 2 for about 8 minutes.
2) Add salt (the dough’s temperature must be between 16°C and 19°C) and mix
3) Slowly pour the rest of the water. Total mixing time is 20min.
mariana
Thanks for that info. Very helpful.