Planetary & Spiral Mixers Online, 7 to 60 Litre

Planetary and spiral mixers look similar and do different jobs. Buying the wrong one is the single most expensive mistake in a bakery kitchen, because a planetary mixer asked to knead bread dough all day will not last, and a spiral mixer cannot whip cream at all.

Planetary mixers: batter, cream and everything light

A planetary mixer drives one attachment around a fixed bowl, the way a hand moves around a mixing bowl. Change the attachment and the machine changes job: whisk for cream and egg, paddle for cake batter and icing, hook for small quantities of dough. The range here runs from 7 litres on 350 W up to 40 litres on 2 KW.

Read the max kneading figure, not the bowl size. A 20 litre planetary takes 20 litres of bowl but is rated for 3 kg of dough, and a 40 litre for 12 kg. The bowl figure tells you what fits; the kneading figure tells you what the motor will survive.

Spiral mixers: bread dough, and nothing else

A spiral mixer turns a spiral hook in one direction while the bowl turns in the other. That develops gluten without heating the dough, which is what bread needs and what a planetary struggles to do at volume. The range runs from 10 litres taking 4 kg of dough on 0.75 KW up to 64 litres taking 26 kg on 2.6 KW.

Notice the difference in the numbers: a 10 litre spiral handles 4 kg of dough while a 20 litre planetary handles 3 kg. That gap is the whole argument. If bread, buns or pizza base is your product, a small spiral out-works a much larger planetary and will still be running in five years.

Sizing by what you actually make

• Cake shop, cream and batter: planetary, 10 to 30 litres depending on batch size.
• Bread bakery: spiral, sized on kilos of dough per batch. Work backwards from your recipe weight.
• Both products: most working bakeries end up with one of each rather than one machine doing both badly.

Tell us kilos of dough per batch, or litres of cream, and we will size the machine to the recipe rather than to the showroom.