This is a nice machine that cuts an hour of work down to minutes. It’s straightforward and no frills. Push the button to divide and round or only dividing. Voila! 36 perfectly shaped dough balls. The Elite Series from American Eagle Food Machinery® adds some premium features not found on the standard version of the dough divider rounder. Some nice touches include a more powerful 3HP motor, ergonomically friendly horizontal rounding controls, a unique dual cam design which helps stabilize the rounding head, built in stabilizing feet, a lever locking system, and a separate main power control. There are additional built in seals on the machine base panels to help prevent flour and dust from getting into the machinery compartments. The internal components like the shafts, springs, and cams also are larger or thicker than the standard version, so it's even heavier duty compared to the standard version which is already pretty tough. All in all, it's these additional touches that make the machine preferable in higher volume situations or if you simply want more precise results in your process.

In our field experience, we haven’t found the productivity to be 6000 per hour. That would basically require making three batches per minute, an Olympian feat. Possible, in theory, if one person were standing next to the machine dividing then cutting, while someone else directly handed them dough. But most of the time, walking over to other equipment, and scraping dough out of the mixer slows down the process. We also wish that the capacity of the AE-DD30R and AE-DD36R were rated for more than 6 pounds. We suspect that is because they wanted to emphasize that the machine divides for only rolls or bun sized pieces. We have seen upper limits for similar divider/rounders from the Duchess line at around 11 ounce pieces and 15 pound batches. Since small pizzas or bread loaves start at about 11 ounces, halving the rating conveniently makes dividing anything bigger a moot point.

We also don’t recommend using the machine for anything other than dough. Has anyone tried? Well yes, we’ve had customers inquire about meatballs or falafels, and how this would automate the process. The results weren’t great, so keep looking for other solutions. Besides, it doesn’t seem worth trouble, as the cleanup would be quite a challenge. The blades are not removable, and removing tiny pieces of meat from the blades by hand seems like a very unpleasant thing to do. One more note for our customers, once you decide on a 30 or 36 cut, it cannot be changed. So please be very sure of what you want before placing the order.