I’m working on an upcoming post about my favorite baking tools, equipment, and supplies, one of which is the humble metal kidney clay scraper pictured above. Normally used to shape pottery, I inherited a couple of them from past cob oven-building projects. While they aren’t useful for making bread directly, I discovered that they are extremely effective at removing recalcitrant, crusted-on dough from mixing bowls and containers. The thin-gauge metal is flexible enough to conform to the shape of the container closely, and just soft enough that the scraper won’t leave scratches or generate that nails-on-a-chalkboard screech when metal usually meets metal.
For this week’s open thread, why don’t you share some of your favorite and most-used bread and baking tools, obscure or otherwise?
—Andrew
May sound odd, but one of my regular baking tools when needing my dough to rise, is an old-fashioned heating pad. I bake on stoneware so while I’m prepping everything, the stone sits on the warm pad, slowly warming up. Dough rises great.
Challenger Bread Pan! And, cambros, dough whisks, baking steel. I've collected a lot of different tools since I started baking bread, it's been a lot of fun!! And I just got some of the baguette specific tools so once I watch the video I'll be trying them!