Best Mixer for Cinnamon Rolls and Enriched Dough

Enriched doughs are the diplomatic challenge of the bread world. Butter, sugar, eggs, and milk make a roll tender and rich, and they also make gluten development a fight. Fat coats protein strands and slows their cross-linking; sugar competes with the yeast for water; eggs add structure but also weight. The result is a dough that wants a long, careful mix and a mixer that will not overheat doing it.

The technique most professional bakers use is staged: develop the gluten in a lean dough first, then add the fat in stages once the structure is set. This works beautifully, but it places a real demand on the mixer. You may be running for twenty minutes total across the bench mix, the fat incorporation, and the final smoothing. A motor that gets warm in five is going to hurt by minute fifteen.

Heat is the enemy

Two kinds of heat will ruin an enriched dough. The first is butter melting too soon; once you blow past 75 to 78 degrees Fahrenheit, the laminated structure that gives a brioche or a cinnamon roll its layers starts to break down and the dough turns greasy. The second is motor heat radiating into the bowl from a struggling drive. A mixer that can run for fifteen minutes without warming up is doing you a quiet favor with every batch.

You can taste the difference between a brioche dough that was patient and one that was rushed.

This is one place where bowl-bottom drives consistently outperform top-driven planetary mixers in the home kitchen. The motor sits below the bowl in its own housing, with no shaft running through the mass of the dough, so the dough stays cooler and the motor breathes better. Combined with a sustained 700W of torque, you can run an enriched dough for as long as it needs without rushing it for the machine’s sake.

How to mix an enriched dough well

1. Mix the lean ingredients first and develop most of the gluten before adding fat
2. Add cold butter in small pieces, on low speed, only after the dough is smooth
3. Pause as needed to let the dough rest if it gets warm to the touch
4. Finish on a slightly higher speed only after the fat is fully incorporated
5. Pull the dough when it is silky and stretches without tearing

For cinnamon rolls, kolaches, brioche, and panettone, the right mixer is not the most powerful one. It is the one that can stay calm for twenty minutes at a time and still feel cool to the touch when you are done.

Continue reading in Volume I — Bread Baking Power.