What is a dough divider？
What is a dough divider？
It’s a machine that helps you divide high-volume dough into uniform pieces.
It is a staple in bakeries, pizzerias, chapati naan flatbread factory or any baking industry.
This equipment improve the production efficiency and quality of finished products.
But how?
Firstly, in terms of efficiency, it can divide bulk material into lots of pieces of set weight with high accuracy within a few seconds.
It frees up your time and labor weighing every pieces manually.
Secondly, the uniformity of dough portions ensures every bread loaves, cookies, pizza, buns, pizza rolls, chapati or whatever can be baked evenly.
This means there is little possibility of burning or undercooking individual products.
Most people think choosing the ideal dough preparation equipment is all about browsing supplier’s websites and seeking advice from sales, especially when you can’t see how the machine works in person.
But in my opinion, it’s better to know about it in advance of your inquiry. And the same goes for other restaurant equipment. If you want to add some equipment to your bread loaves, or you are looking for equipment for your customers, we recommend you read on.
The Different Types of Dough Dividing Machine
There are basically four types of industrial dividing machines available in global market and they are:
①Pneumatic divider with photoelectric sensor
②Mechanical divider
③Hydraulic divider
④Manual divider
If you regularly check the shopping sites such as Alibaba, you will see that the most numerous equipment is the manual one, But the fact is that there are various types of dividers and working principles depending on customers’ needs.
The thing is,
Different types of divider are suitable for different business. If you aim on the wrong machine at the beginning, it’ll take much efforts to go back in the right direction.
It gets worse because:
Machines of the same type look pretty much the same in appearance but their prices and capacity differ greatly. For example, a manual divider may be the cheapest, but in reality it’s only good for pita, so if you’re planning to buy it to make puff pastry, then it may not be so suitable.
And that’s why I’d like to tell working principles of different dough portion dividers.
Let’s dive right in.
Pneumatic Divider with Photoelectric Sensor
This machine divides volumetrically. The diameter and length of the dough column decide its volume, thus its weight.
This is how it works:
Put the raw materials into the hopper. Being pushed and extruded by the two screw propellers, the pieces comes out from the outlet. The cutter, being pushed by the air compressor, cuts the dough when the sensor senses it at certain position. Cut pieces are conveyed to the next machine or process.
Here comes the conclusion:
This dough divider is particularly suitable for business that:
- Require the machine to work continuously. (E.G. medium and large sized bakery, pizzeria, chapati, bread loaves, buns, pita bread factory, etc.)
- Require high weight accuracy.
- Process dough of high moisture content.
Mechanical Divider
This divider also cuts dough according to volume.
Put the raw materials into the hopper or tray. The propelling system pushed the material out of the outlet. Once the materials touches the roller, the cutter will rotate and cut off the dough. The pieces fall into the rounding plate made of stainless steel or plastic, depending on the price of the machine. Flour box above the roller spreads flour to prevent the dough from sticking to each other or the rounding plate. This is very convenient for cleaning.
Differences between the mechanical and pneumatic divider are:
- The mechanical one is only applicable to stiff material.
If the material is soft, it’ll flow from the outlet and fall down. Therefore, cutter will not rotate and cut. Even if it does, there’s no way it portions dough accurately.
- Price.
Compared to other equipment, the mechanical type has low price due to its simple structure and limited application.
Hydraulic Divider
Hydraulic dough dividers are most commonly seen in bread loaves. It cuts dough into portions.
Put the materials on the cutter board. Press and spread it evenly. Scatter some flour on the dough in case it sticks to the cover. Close the cover. The hydraulic system pushes the cutter up and the dough is then divided into portions according to the shape and size of cutter. Then the operator takes pieces out.
There’s one thing particularly good about hydraulic dough divider:
Unlike volumetric dough divider, you can change the cutter and cutter board to divide dough into different shapes like triangle, diamond and so on.
Therefore, you can produce breads of various shapes and sizes, thus to increase the diversity of products without spending extra time on forming dough portions.
However, every coin has two sides. The biggest drawback to this dough portioner is:
It can’t work continuously.
You have to weigh the proper amount of dough before putting it into the machine. After dividing, you need to take the dough portions out one by one by hands.
What’s worse?
It can not be integrated with other dough processing equipment.
As the second step of dough preparation, dough divider is always coupled to dough mixer and dough rounder. This forms a complete bread and rolls dough production line and greatly save time and labor while ensuring the consistency.
Clearly,
The hydraulic dough is not designed for that aim.
And this is why I don’t recommend it to large-scaled business.
Manual Divider
Manual dough dividers vary in shapes. Part of them are table top dough divide and others have stands.
You can see manual divider as a simplified version of hydraulic divider. The biggest difference between them is the power system.
And this is how manual dough divider works:
Put the materials onto the dividing pan. Put the pan under the knife head. Lower the handle to press it. Lower the cutting handle to divide the dough into portions. Take out the dividing pan for next process.The Manual dough divider works just like that.
According to the description above, we can conclude:
Manual dough divider is only suitable for small-sized business such as home bakery, small naan tortilla workshop and so on.
Conclusion
So that’s it for my guide to dough divider.
Now I’d like to hear from you.
What field are you or your customers in? What’s the scale of your business?
What type of the machine are you going to purchase?
What equipment do you already have?
What other restaurant equipment do you need?
Or maybe you still have questions about it.
Either way, let me know by leaving a comment below or sending an inquiry.
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