This year's holiday gift-giving guide focuses on the tools I use most often and consider essential for my bread baking. After three years of testing recipes for Breaducation, my feelings about the tools I use has evolved; some have remained constant companions, while others have been replaced by others I've come to find more useful.
You may have lots of these things already, since I've written about them here before, but most would make great gifts for those in your life who are just getting into bread baking.
This will likely be my final un-paywalled post for the year. I'll see you all again in the new year, after I get through one last push on Breaducation, including shooting all of the photographs. Have a happy, bread-filled holiday season and thank you for being a subscriber. I am extremely excited to get back to Wordloaf full-time in 2026; I have lots in store for you once the book is fully in the can.
Starter Whisks and Bread Baker's Pocket Companions
The first item is my own sourdough starter whisk, which I have recently updated to use very nice hardwood handles fabricated in Maine. I have had a hard time keeping these in stock lately, but I've got 500 on hand to sell between now and December 12 (the cutoff date for in-time holiday shipping in the U.S.).
If you want in on them, please place an order soon, because at the rate orders are coming in already, they are sure to sell out quickly. (I will continue to make more, but once this batch runs out, additional orders won't ship until the new year.) And don't forget, Wordloaf paid subscribers get 20% off orders from my shop.
Baking bread is so much easier when you can easily cover doughs and shaped breads without hassle. Nordic Ware lidded pans are my go-to choice for bulk proofing doughs. These are the ones I use regularly:
9x13 cake pan: bulk proofing double-batch doughs; proofing/baking hot dog buns
half- and quarter-sheet pans: focaccia, dough balls for pita, pizza, and other flatbreads
2" deep half-sheet pans: long, tall loaves like challah, hoagie rolls, etc. (I set them on parchment, and carefully remove them from the deep pan prior to baking.)
I've got a stack of scales here in my kitchen, but the one I reach for most often remains my Oxo 11-lb scale. It is sturdy, accurate, easily cleaned, and—best of all—comes with a lifetime warranty. I finally killed mine, and they sent me a brand new one a few days later. They are more expensive than other scales, but the warranty makes them worth the extra cost IMO.
For weighing sub-5g amounts of ingredients, which no kitchen scale can do accurately, I use a pocket scale that displays in 0.1g increments. I have a stack of these too, but the one I use most often is the American Weigh 1000g Blade:
I''m guessing I baked more than 1000 hearth loaves while working on Breaducation, and all but a handful of them were proofed in Flourside wood pulp bannetons, which remain my favorite brand. Get the largest ones, which will accommodate loaves both large and small.
I've tested out the new bannetons from Brod & Taylor, and I like them, with one caveat. They are much thinner than the standard wood pulp ones, making them lighter and much more compact to store, and they seem no less sturdy for it. My one beef with them is that they do not make a batard-style one large enough to accommodate a 900g loaf comfortably. I've been in touch with B&T about this, and it's my hope that they'll create a larger one someday soon.
I've also baked most of those hearth loaves under a Brod & Taylor Bread Shell, set on their "Max" steel. Both the batard and boule versions work equally well for long loaves; the boule one is larger, and can accommodate long or round loaves, along with up to 1.5 kilo miches.
The Max steel is only $10 more than the "regular" one, but it is sturdier (especially if you add ice cubes to your bakes, which will warp the latter) and retains a lot more heat, making it better for baking flatbreads without a shell.
In the summer, I set the AC in my kitchen to 78˚F, so I can proof most things on the countertop. The rest of the year I rely on my Sourdough Home proofer to pamper my starters and yeasted preferments. It holds temperature perfectly, and—unlike any other similar product on the market—it can both warm up and chill down to nearly any temperature.
I still remain loyal to my Polder timers, of which I have seven in constant use, one per recipe in progress. Being small, they are easily kept with the container in question. Since you can run a “count-up” timer at the same time as a countdown, they are essential for tracking the total elapsed time (say the total duration of a bulk fermentation), while also counting down to the next step in the recipe (like a fold).
I proof my daily tiny starter refreshment in Weck 760 Mini Mold jars fitted with a 60mm plastic lid. And I proof most of my levains and preferments in the 743 3/4-liter mold jars, which take the "large" 100mm lids. (Remember to poke a hole or two in the lids with a thumbtack to prevent pressure buildup.) I also use the larger jars to ferment and store my homemade yogurt.
I always set my hearth loaves on a sling of some kind before transferring them to the oven or a bread vessel. For large loaves I use sheets of parchment paper, but everything else goes on a Rosehill Bread Mat. My preference is for the rectangular "C" model, which can accommodate round or oblong loaves equally well.
All of the pan breads in Breaducation have been scaled for and baked in Rackmaster's 9x4x4 lidded pullman pans. There are other similar pans out there, but I love these ones, and they've held up beautifully after years of use. You can find them in the U.S. at Pleasant Hill Grain:
While I've tested most of my recipes in a variety of mixers, the one I've used most recently is the Ooni Halo Pro Spiral, which remains a workhorse. It's pricey, but IMO well worth the expense if you bake bread seriously. (Ooni is currently having a 20% off sale through the end of this week, but unfortunately the mixer is not included in it.)
I have ground a lot of grain for testing recipes in Breaducation, all of it in my Mockmill mill. I have the Lino 100, but all of the tabletop models are equally great, and only differ in throughput and aesthetics.
Of all the tools I use in my home bakery—or my kitchen, generally—none gets used more often than my Teiger Dough Cloth, which I wrote about for Serious Eats awhile back. While I have a couple of them in use, the one I tested more than two years ago is still in rotation, even after thousands of uses and hundreds of cycles through the dishwasher. And while the cloth is designed for cleaning doughs off of containers and tools, it's really an all-purpose cleaning tool, one that even a non-bread-baker would find useful.
Herbs and Spices from Curio Spice and Burlap and Barrel
For spices and herbs for baking and cooking, I remain dedicated to my hometown shop Curio Spice, and to Burlap and Barrel, both of which are having sales right now, so there is no better time for stocking up or stuffing stockings.
I'm sure there are things I've forgotten, but if you are looking for other bready tools as gifts, check out my 2022 Mega Equipment Guide, which I plan to update sometime next year:
Wordloaf
Wordloaf
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FLOURSIDE
Brod & Taylor
Brod & Taylor
Brod & Taylor
Brod & Taylor
Brod & Taylor
Brod & Taylor
Richard D.
Gerhard Sollner
Ooni
Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, Jan 18, 2019
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Andrew Janjigian
