The Exact HDX Continuous Mixer is designed specifically for dough development at low temperatures. Discover how dough development machinery from Reading Bakery Systems could benefit your production lines.
Headquartered in Robesonia, Pennsylvania, Reading Bakery Systems is the leading manufacturer of innovative, reliable, and high-volume processing systems for the global food manufacturing industry, with a particular emphasis on baked snack production systems.
We proudly offer the world’s most technologically advanced equipment and systems from:
- Exact Mixing (the world’s most innovative developer of Continuous Mixing solutions);
- Thomas L. Green (which has supplied the biscuit, cracker and cookie industries since 1893);
- Reading Pretzel (whose long history of manufacturing expertise dates back to 1947); and
- Reading Thermal (which manufactures the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System, a standard in the baking industry).
Our primary mixer brand – Exact Mixing – is the proven leader in Continuous Mixing technology and has made us a leader in the snack food industry. This innovative technology provides customers with consistent dispersion of ingredients, simpler dough feed equipment, and tighter control over the entire mixing process.
Continuous Mixing for Dough Development
The HDX (or High Development) Continuous Mixer was explicitly developed to manufacture ultra-high absorption, highly developed dough at low temperatures, such as bread, hot dog and hamburger buns, hard rolls, English muffins, tortillas, and multi-grain products.
This two-stage High Development Continuous Mixer first mixes all ingredients into a uniform mass with a twin-screw mixer. Then, in a separate section, the dough is kneaded to the proper development level with a single-screw mixer. The mixer offers dough production rates of 1,500 to 10,000 kg/hour.
How Batch Mixing and Continuous Mixing Compare
- Bulk delivery of materials: The systems used to deliver bulk materials to the mixer are the same for batch and continuous mixing. They are typically brought from a source such as a silo or super sack unloader to the mixing receiver by pneumatic transfer. In the continuous mixing process, ingredients can also be added by hand with a ribbon blender. The key difference is that the addition of raw materials to a continuous mixer is more accurate than with a batch mixer in nearly every case.
- Measuring of materials into the mixer: Extra weighing equipment and controls are often required to get the right-sized batch of ingredients to the batch mixer. With a continuous mixer, all metering is done directly at the mixer, leading to greater automation, more accuracy, and a significant cost savings in the long term.
- Mixing: Studies indicate that continuous mixing eliminates dough variations associated with batch cycles and produces a consistent product all day, every day. At the lowest production rates (500 to 1500 pounds per hour), batch mixing is slightly less expensive than continuous mixing. At higher rates, continuous mixing is less expensive, and the savings improve as production rates increase.
- Dough leaves mixer in usable size loaves: Batch mixers create large “batches” of dough, and manufacturers need extra equipment to resize them. This often causes time delays and unnecessary exposure to the environment where contamination may occur. Continuous mixers produce a constant stream of dough that can be sliced automatically into loaves by the mixer.
As you evaluate Continuous Mixers and other dough development machinery lines, consider Reading Bakery Systems. Contact us at (01) 610-693-5816, or click here for additional information.