Wild Yeast

People often ask me what I recommend as the most important tools to get first, if you have a limited budget for baking equipment. These items are listed in roughly the reverse order in which you could pry them from my hands. It’s also not a bad list of gift ideas for any bread baker in your life.*

• Baking stone. It’s hard to get good crusty hearth loaves without one (and here’s why). High-end is the Fibrament, but a less expensive stone, or even unglazed terra cotta tiles, will do the job, although they’re more prone to breakage. $10 – $100.
• Steam set-up for your oven. This is not an item you can buy; it’s rigged from inexpensive components. Steam is essential for most crusty breads. Read more about the why and how of steam here. $15 – $25.
• Bench scraper (aka bench knife, dough scraper, or dough cutter), like this one. Cuts ciabatta dough into pieces, lifts sticky pieces of dough off the counter, and cleans your counter of tenacious dough bits and loose flour. About $12.
• Digital scale. It is my personal mission in life to see that everyone measures their baking ingredients by weight, not volume. More about that here. I like the My Weigh i5000 and the Escali Primo. $25 – $50.
• Instant-read thermometer. Dough temperature is important for proper fermentation. Read more about temperature here. A thermometer is also useful if you don’t know whether your loaf is fully baked yet. The Thermapen is wonderfully fast but pricey; this Taylor Digital Thermometer works fine for much less money. $15 – $90.
• Small ingredients scale. Ingredients like yeast and salt that are usually called for in amounts of 10 grams or less are best weighed on a scale that has precision to a tenth of a gram. However, these  ingredients also measure fairly well by volume, so this is not an essential tool. It’s nice to have, though. $20 – $40.
• Stand mixer. Although nice to have, especially for certain doughs like bagels and brioche, most breads can be mixed just fine by hand, so a mixer is a lower priority. Mine is a KitchenAid 6-qt. and I recommend it. About $400.

*Note to my male friends on the appropriateness of these things as gifts to wives/girlfriends: For birthdays and other occasions, it might depend on the woman in question, and on the gift — mixer, probably; scale, perhaps; lava rocks, doubtful — but for anniversaries, just don’t do it! Trust me on this one.

I love these things.

Not the flours, grains, and seeds (seen here dragged from their beds so I could assess which ones are fit to make the 6-mile move to my new home next week), although I do love them too. But I’m talking about the colorful bars that clip the bags closed.

If you don’t already know about these little hinged pieces of plastic, your life is about to be changed forever. Okay, maybe they’re not life-changing in the same way as, say, a credit card and Velcro are, but still. Not having to grapple with knots, twist-ties, rubber bands, tape, or springs is huge. I can clip these one-piece guys on and snap them off again with one hand tied behind my back, and when they’re on they stay put.

(Read more…)

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…