I am new here but I have looked around to see what I could find. I was wondering if I am just baking for my family. I bake 8 loaves every 5 days. I have a Bosch 6 qt. This takes me approx. 6 hours. I am looking to do the whole shebang at once. Or at least 2 mixings. Right now I can mix only 2 loaves at a time. But even doing that I feel like I am too hard on my mixer. Any suggestions on which mixer? I have an opportunity to get a 20 qt. Univex or Welbilt for about $900. Which seems to be a pretty good deal. But I don't know about how well made they are. Thank you for any advice.
There are no knead (and little knead) techniques you can use, in addition with a longer ferment to make life easy for you. I use them in my "low impact" bakery and can hand knead up to 3Kg of dough at a time. (More than that starts to get hard to physically manage)
A little write-up here: http://moorbakes.co.uk/sourdough-made-easy-part-1/
that's making 8 small (450g baked weight) loaves.
However if you really want to make 8 (large, 800g cooked weight?) loaves in one go, then you need a big mixer. I have a Hobart A200 plus spiral dough hook for that, and even then the limit is 6 large loaves (just under 6Kg dough) and while the A200 can do a bit more, I don't have a proving box big enough! (although I do have 4 of these boxes - could buy bigger, but it's a convenient load size for my baking right now)
On my busy days when I'm making 20-30 loaves I'll use my little-knead method for the smaller batches and the A200 for the bigger batches - so I'm effectively running both methods at once to cut down on kneading time. I'm usually done, bar the washing up in under an hour.
-Gordon