How To Clean The Pizza Spiral Mixer

Last updated on November 12th, 2023 at 07:16 pm

Moving from a stand mixer to a more professional spiral mixer for pizza dough brings some challenges. Besides adapting the way you knead, you also need to take into consideration you will most probably have a fixed bowl. That means that cleaning the pizza spiral mixer cannot happen moving the bowl in a dishwasher for example. But no worries, it is not complicated. You just need to know a few steps and we will cover them in this guide.

Actually this article came to my mind recently. After I talked with several people buying a pizza spiral mixer and finding out they could not remove the bowl just after their first pizza dough kneading. In fact in the majority of cases we are talking about professional kitchen equipment. As such even the smaller mixer models are derived from big ones meant to be used to knead several Kgs of pizza dough. You can imagine it would be hard – if not impossible – to move around a huge and heavy bowl. So to clean it you have to rely on what I am explaining in this article.

This article topics:

• Should I buy a Tilting Spiral Dough mixer?
• Accessories to clean a spiral mixer
• Step by step cleaning process
• Tips for perfectly clean spiral mixers

You are going to realize how easy is the process for cleaning the pizza spiral mixer.

Should I Buy a Tilting Spiral Dough Mixer?

Recently I published an article where I gave you details about what mixer is best for pizza. At the time I was focusing on technical details and reasons why you want to have a dough mixer machine for pizza.

Spiral mixers bowls are connected to the motor
that provides the bowl turning movement

Now let’s add one more piece to the puzzle that is very relevant here. Some times you can ask yourself if it makes sense to buy a spiral mixer with detachable bowl. It means a tilting spiral dough mixer. Honestly speaking, don’t select your mixer only according to this option.

Consider that spiral mixers are meant mainly for people making pizza as a profession. First of all when it comes to the amount of pizza dough they can knead. The smallest pizza mixer you can buy is for 5Kg of pizza dough! But of course market offers very similar (if not same) models scaled to knead 20, 30 or even 50Kg of pizza. And here comes the most important consideration that follows.

Can you imagine to remove a bowl meant to keep so many Kilograms of dough and bring it to a place where you can clean it? It would be a huge effort! Let alone that spiral mixers bowls are connected to the motor that provides the bowl rotating movement. So, besides few exceptions – mainly valid when buying a spiral mixer for home – you will find on the market mixers for pizza dough with a fixed bowl. And that’s absolutely fine!

Of course the consequence is that cleaning the pizza spiral mixer needs to be arranged without moving the machine itself or the bowl. To be honest this is not a big deal. As we are going to learn we are talking about small effort. As always it’s just matter of knowing what to do.

Accessories to Clean the Spiral Mixers

To clean your spiral mixer you only need the following:

• A bowl or any other large water recipient.
• A sponge for dishes (like this)
• All purpose cloth (like this)

First of all, note that I am generally using as a water recipient the same I used to weigh the flour… It’s absolutely fine.

You can also notice that we are going to clean the bowl without moving the spiral mixer. That is why we want the bowl or a large water recipient. If you have a big pizza dough mixer you most probably keep it on the floor with some wheels. In that case you can probably easy move the mixer closer to a place where you have a better option than a water recipient to clean your sponge. But let’s cover this part in the next paragraph.

Step by Step Cleaning Process

The first step to clean the pizza spiral mixer is to add half a centimeter of clean water in the bowl:

Then immerse your sponge for dishes in the water recipient that you want to keep close to the pizza mixer. After immersion, make sure you have it well wrung. Now is time to use the wet sponge in the spiral mixer bowl to remove all the pizza dough and dirty from flour:

As you have some water in the bowl, you want to absorb it with the sponge for dishes and then wrung the water absorbed in the water recipient. At the same time, once well wrung, re-immerse the sponge in the clean water recipient to rinse it.

Then repeat again the process until you have no remaining water in the spiral mixer bowl.

At this point is time to take the all purpose cloth and dry as much as you can the pizza dough mixer bowl. During this step you also want to refine the cleaning. You may be still have some flour or dry dough somewhere you want to remove.

That’s it. Can you guess how much time it takes? I can tell you: 5 minutes!

Tips for Perfectly Clean Spiral Mixers

Tip number 1: clean immediately after you have finished the dough preparation. Don’t wait too much time. Otherwise the dough wuill start to dry and it will be much more difficult to remove.

Tip number 2: to ease the cleaning, make sure the spiral mixer is turned off and manually rotate the bowl. This will help to clean the spiral hook and all “hidden” parts of the bowl.

Tip number 3: pay particular attention to the cleaning of spiral hook and to dough breaker bar. For the first, notice if you have any dough in the upper part. Especially if you worked with a lot of pizza dough or temperature went a bit high. In fact in this scenarios the dough is “climbing” the hook. On the other end the dough breaker bar very often has dough remaining below it. So keep an eye in the lower part of the bar and remove any dough from there.

Tip number 4: don’t forget to clean the cover/grid. Especially when you added ingredients while keeping the pizza dough mixer running.

Tip number 5: should be obvious but please don’t only focus on the bowl and parts around it. Make sure you also clean behind the bowl and the entire spiral mixer.