IGF Fornitalia Spiral Stand Mixers for Bread Dough
By far the most regularly-seen mixer in the best artisan bakeries around the world is the spiral mixer, and at BakeryBits we’re able to deliver that same power and dependability to the home prosumer and micro-baker with the IGF Fornitalia dough mixer machines: the great value, high capacity IGF Fornitalia 2200 series; and the powerful tabletop 3100 mixer.
By far the most regularly-seen mixer in the best artisan bakeries around the world is the spiral mixer, and at BakeryBits we’re able to deliver that same power and dependability to the home prosumer and micro-baker with the IGF Fornitalia dough mixer machines: the great value, high capacity IGF Fornitalia 2200 series; and the powerful tabletop 3100 mixer. Why do bakers rely on spiral machines so much? It’s due to their unparalleled ability to mix extremely low and high-hydration dough effortlessly, ability to keep the dough relatively cool during mixing, incorporate new ingredients at later stages in the dough mixing quickly, while speedily stretching and aerating the dough: meaning they’re no bread-dough type recipes that cannot be superbly handled by this machine, and no time wasted while it happens. If you’re regular making artisan bread, pizza, focaccia, bagels, croissant, then this is the machine to check out.
Many manufacturers of other types of bakery mixers types claim they too can do all these things, but only a spiral mixer like the IGF Fornitalia really can.
There are often recipes where you want to mix dough with very little water yet still have it mix quickly to a beautiful smooth elasticity: classic English tin loaves, crusty bread rolls, croissant and Danish dough, biga for panettone and colomba, and more. The spiral mixer is extremely good at this because the rotating mixer “spiral” – a twist of solid stainless steel that cuts through the centre of the dough – acts in tandem with the rotating bowl. So this double-rotation action of the IGF Fornitalia ensures maximum power is given to the dough mixing even at very slow speeds and is able to knead extremely firm dough with ease: something that tends to stress the mechanics of a planetary-style mixer (Kitchen Aid, Kenwood, Hobart).
The IGF Fornitalia wide rotating bowl, and offset mixing action to one side, means that dough temperature is kept relatively cool if you need an extended mixing time, compared to a deep bowl and central hook action of a planetary-style mixer.
The spiral action creates less friction (and therefore heat) on the dough as only part of the dough is being kneading at any moment. Also, a vertical “break bar” down the centre of the bowl pushes the dough outward and away from the middle. This is vitally important: if the dough gets overly warm and over-worked during mixing you potentially get dense bread. Extended cool mixing is essential for a complex dough like Panettone, and we recommend a spiral mixer in our recipe for it here.
Small dough mixes are no problem for a spiral mixer compared to some other machine types. The IGF Fornitalia’s rotating shallow mixer bowl ensures even small quantities of ingredients are always kept level with the rotating hook during mixing; and are not (in the case of planetary-style mixers) pulled away by gravity to the bottom of a deep bowl, or 
worse, cause the dough to grip the hook and simply spin without kneading at all.
One aspect is in the IGF Fornitalia’s ability to quickly and smoothly mix new ingredients into a dough. So if a short while into the using the mixer you want to pop in something else – butter, salt, dark malt, a cooked starch mixture - or if at a later stage you want to take half the dough out, and add olives, nuts, even chocolate to the remainder you can do so quickly without the dough overheating. This is often the case when making great bagels, check out our sourdough recipe for them using a spiral mixer here.
IGF Fornitalia spiral stand dough mixers are the result of 40 years of baking industry experience, designed for keen home bakers, micro-bakeries and development kitchens exclusively in UK from BakeryBits. All the machines have been built with the robustness and ease of use in mind. There is a range of capacities from 7 to 20 litres, single-phase power, ideal for small to medium batches of doughs from pizza dough to sourdough.