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