Weight variances, depositors and rotary moulders.

When working with depositors for depositing your dough or batter onto an oven belt or baking tray the fill level can influence massively dough weight: within a row and in time. Ideally the fill level is constantly and consistently the same: that level is different however for a dough that requires wire-cutting compared to a more liquid batter. As a rule of thumb it shouldn’t be too much, preferably enough that there is enough pressure for pistons or the rollers (depends on the design of your machine), but so little that there cant be a build up of hardening batter on the sides of the hopper: this will continue to build and in the end, over time result in weight variances.

Another example are weight variances in a rotary moulder, sometimes even having incomplete product coming from the mould; but unpredictable why it seems… This inconsistency can go back to the mixing process, but if the process is sometimes resulting in good product and in other moments in lesser product the coause could be in between the rotary moulder and your mixer as well. Depending if you’re using a continuous mixer or a batch mixer the handling will be a bit different after mixing; but in many case a machine is used to make sure that dough is made in thin slices that can be cut to fill the hopper of the moulder. In other cases this is done by hand. If the process of feeding the hopper is automated sometime even a pre-hopper and cutter are being used. Weight differences within a row can already start here: if there is more dough on side of the pre-hopper the dough density might change resulting in heavier and lighter product within a row and between rows

After this pre-hopper the dough moves to the hopper that feeds the feeding and moulding rollers of the rotary moulder: if there is occasionally too much fill level we see aphenomenon called ‘bridging’ the dough does not fall between the two rollers and no or incomplete product comes out. The most consistency is reached when just sufficient dough falls equally over the full lengths of the moulder so it directly is taken.

Half products in rotary moulders can sometimes also be caused by the extraction web: this web extracts by a ‘suction’of the dough from the mould. The mould itself can be of influence to this as well as the product formulation: the angle in which the extraction takes place, if the extraction belt requires treatment (e.g. water, steam, heat ‘porridge’) to facilitate this.

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