Wild Yeast

This is a loader.

It’s what we use at SFBI to deliver about 20 loaves at a time into the deck oven without harming one strand of gluten on their pretty little heads. This canvas conveyor belt does a great job of ensuring, for example, that our lovely pear-shaped loaves don’t wind up becoming oranges or bananas on their way into the oven.

This is a Super Peel.

It’s what you can use at home to pick up your own pears, pizzas, or pains de campagne and deposit them onto your baking stone equally unscathed. And although it’s modeled after those big conveyor belts, it’s far more versatile. The SFBI loader can’t pick up a rolled-out pie crust from the counter and move it onto the pie dish, or transfer a freshly-ganached cake from wire rack to serving plate, but the Super Peel is great for these tricky jobs.

Check out videos of the Super Peel in action at the Super Peel website.

Thanks to Gary Casper, Super Peel’s inventor, you can have a chance to win a Super Peel (your choice of original maple or gorgeous new butternut) just by being a US resident and leaving a comment here by 11:59 PDT on Friday, October 23. Gary will even upgrade to a gift set — including a cloth storage bag and an extra cloth belt — if the comment I pick at random is super good (as judged by me).

I apologize for not announcing the winner of the brotforms earlier. If you haven’t heard from me, you didn’t win, I’m sorry. The only person who has heard from me is Dave R from Boston, MA; congratulations, Dave!

As I said before, I highly recommend Brotform.com for your brotform needs. Good selection, good prices, fast shipping, nice people. So go order some.

Got brotforms?

These coiled cane proofing baskets turn ordinary loaves into affairs of crusty gorgeousness. You can read more about their use and care here.

I’ve discovered that Brotform.com is a wonderful source for brotforms. Not only do their prices beat all others I’ve found by quite a bit, but my order arrived in record time and I did not feel gouged on the shipping charges. They offer a variety of sizes in round, oval, and oblong shapes.

All of this is, of course, meant to console and inform you in case you are not the lucky winner of the two brotforms — 9″ round and 8.5″ oval — that the very nice people at Brotform.com will send to a randomly-drawn commenter on this post, provided said commenter has a US shipping address.

So go on and comment it up before 11:59 PM PST on Thursday, July 9. Please make it interesting (but hey, no pressure!).

See this week’s yeast spottings…

I would like to wish happy weighing to Joey D of San Diego, winner of the My Weigh i5000 scale, and Nicole Dula of Dula Notes, winner of the KD-8000.

Next time I’m going to have to ask My Weigh for 247 scales, so everyone can win one. I’m not sure if they’ll go for this, though, so it might be a good idea to just get one. Here are a couple of online sources:

Amazon: i5000, KD-8000

Old Will Knott Scales: i5000, KD-8000

I know I’ve said this before (and before and before and before), but I need to weigh in on this again:

If you’re not weighing your ingredients, you should be!

If you don’t know why, go scoot and read my small rant on weighing. (Summary: It’s accurate. It’s fast. It’s neat. Everyone who’s anyone is doing it.) Then come back, because I have something you might want.

For two years my trusty scale has been a My Weigh i5000. I love it because:

• it is spot-on accurate
• it can weigh in either grams (to 1-gram precision) or pounds and ounces (to 0.5-ounce precision)
• it has a capacity of 5 kg
• it is slim and lightweight and fits easily in a kitchen drawer (although I leave mine out because I use it daily)

I love my scale so much I thought I’d ask the people at My Weigh if they would give me one that I could give to one of you, and they were nice enough to say yes.

(Read more…)