What I’m about to list here is what I’ve managed to collect so far or feel I need to get a basic bread making set up, It’s not necessarily ALL the toys and gadgets and must-haves one must have but it’s what seems to be a decent starting-out set up.

1- Kitchen Scales

As mentioned elsewhere, a kitchen scale is nearly mandatory if you want to make consistent breads. Or most baking requirements, for that matter. Because baking, unlike cooking, is to a large degree a science where you mix particular ingredients which, when exposed to specific heat levels or interact with each other, cause particular changes and effects. There’s a reason, for example, why the combination of baking soda and buttermilk in cakes works: the acid in the buttermilk reacts with the soda to cause carbon bubbles, thereby expanding the batter and giving you a nice open texture as the batter bakes to a solid form when the sugar and flour molecules bind together. This is science. Yummy, tasty and chocolaty science but science none the less.

A scale allows you to control very precisely the amounts of each ingredients in a recipe so that you not only get the expected effect but can repeat that process over and over.

2 - Oven Stones

This one isn’t precisely mandatory and some people may even prefer to not use them but oven stones help to keep your oven at a more average temperature as they have a lot of thermal mass; when you open your oven door, the hot air easily flushes out and without stones, you’re left with the element or gas heat to bring the oven temp back to what it should be. With a stone, it holds plenty of heat and isn’t as easily cooled off so the oven temp gets back to “average” a lot sooner.

An oven stone also helps in the cooking of the bread as it comes in contact with a very hot surface quite suddenly.

My oven stones are not stone, nor (quite expensive since they weigh so much) “real” oven stones produced for that purpose. I went to Home Depot and got some unglazed porcelain tiles from the flooring department, they were about $4 for the 1 foot squares and $1.50 each for the two six-by-sixers. I bought two sets of these for two shelves. Total cost: about $15. A “real” oven stone would be well into the $30 and $40 or more, with hefty delivery charges on top if you needed to order them online because there are no baking supply shops near you.

That said, you can still bake bread quite well without.

3 - Reliable Oven Thermometer

Let me just start by simply pointing out my oven sucks. The thermostat on the thing is utterly unreliable as, I’m told by those who cook at home, are the vast majority of ovens. So finding out what the actual temp in the oven when i set it at 475ºF is important as I have a strong suspicion it’s actually a fair bit hotter in there.

So off I’ve gone hunting for a good, accurate oven thermometer. This one I’m still hunting for. I did buy one from Wal-Mart (sorry, sorry, sorry!) but I have the impression it’s not accurate in the least. It’s an inexpensive ($5) coil type and it seems to think the stove is much cooler, like 40 - 50º, than it really is. I’m looking for a Taylor Oven Guide Thermometer which uses a glass stem since I’m supposing that the liquid inside expands at a very specific rate and should therefore be much more accurate. I’ve hit all the kitchen store (that’s right, all one of them) in Burlington as well as the gadget departments at places like Zellers, Can Tire, etc. but none have any type other than the cheapy little coil ones. I may have to order one online and suck up the annoying excessive delivery costs, i.e $6 on a $15 item.

4a - A Couche

Well, a couche (pronounced “koosh”) and the right flour for it: rice flour.

So what’s a couche? It is some fairly heavy, canvas weight tightly woven raw linen cloth which, coated heavily in flour, is used to lay your doughs on to rise. You specifically want raw linen because this type of material still has some of the oils in the fibers which help the fabric from sticking to sticky wet dough. Now it may be possible to find this in a specialty kitchen store (not where I live though) or, again, order it online. $$$. If you’re looking for just raw linen not labeled as a specialty bread making product, you may have better luck at a decent fabric store but that may or may not be something they’d carry. So you’re left with alternatives. Canvas, tight weave, linen.

Art supply store? Artists canvas? Possibly, and it may be that a good quality artists’ canvas, usually sold off a roll by the yard at good art stores, is actually raw linen.

Another possibility: Cotton canvas. Now you’ve got the right weave but are dropping the raw linen and it’s oil aspects in exchange for a material a little easier to find. And here’s a decent place to find it, near almost anyone: Home Depot, paint department, canvas drop cloth. You can get their smaller 5 X 12 foot drop cloth which is just basic canvas. Throw it in the wash to get ansy sizing out and dry then cut some to a suitable size: 24 - 30″ by 2.5′ (half the 5′ width) seems good. But wash it before you cut -I did this the other way and the canvas shrunk on me so it was a fair bit narrower than originally expected. If you want you can sew up the edges. Or not.

Do not bother with cotton dishtowels, they just don’t work that well, they’re too thin and light. I suppose you could find heavy canvas type cotton at a fabric store, I didn’t bother to check, I had a drop cloth already.

Rice Flour: I’ve seen a few suggestion as to what sort of mix this needs to be, 25%, 50 or 100% rice flour to UAP, then rubbed into the couche’s surface. The rice flour makes it nearly teflon-like and the dough won’t stick. I did 50/50 rice to UAP and it worked perfect. Rice flour is available at Bulk Barn for rather cheap. Apply very generously. Don’t wash the couche after each use, just shake the excess off and allow the cloth to dry as it will have absorbed a bit of the moisture from the dough.

Speaking of which: a tip, and I learned this by NOT doing it today: once you’ve got your loaves nicely tucked into thei little rows, cover the tops with plastic wrap laid across or they’ll dry out a bit and give you two different dough surfaces - the bottom facing side stays a little damper - once the loaves have sat there for a few hours. Covering them with the remaining length of canvas isn’t enough to stop them drying a little.

4b - Baskets: Bannetons and Brottforms

These are used to let the bread rise in (mostly) round shapes although you can also get them in long loaf styles as well.

Bannetons:

You’ve seen these everywhere at places like Pier One or HomeSense, baskets lined with a cotton material. Now for actual bread making, the baskets that inspired all these chi-chi type copycats, you’d need round baskets about 8″ wide and again, you want good linen or similar material lining the basket to avoid dough sticking to fuzzier material. For long loaves, you need a somewhat oval shape in a size suitable for a loaf of bread.

Now you’d think this would be somewhat easy to find, even if the store has no idea you wanted them for their actual purpose and they’re selling them as decorative accessories. But noooooooo. I’ve been to about a dozen stores like the above-mentioned Pier One and HomeSense and the Bay and Zellers and Wal-Mart (again sorry, I was getting desperate) and on and on and I saw plenty of cloth lined baskets but none in any shape or size appropriate for a bread loaf. Ugh. So i tried to find just simple round baskets that haven’t been dyed where I can sew in a liner but again, no go.

The search continues.

Brottform:

These are, again, round or long oval baskets but this time they’re not basic wicker but (usually) willow reed wound around and nailed together to make a solid basket. These impart a very distinct pattern onto the dough when you flour the inside liberally, as seen in the blog’s top image. The reed leaves an indentation and the ‘valley’, filled with flour, transfer this to the bread’s surface. Quite nice and extremely “artisanal” in look. Impossible to find unless you want to fork out $50 for ONE basket. Crazy.

5 - Plastic Bowl Scraper

You’d think these things, which you might see online advertised for 69¢ to $2, or which bakeries are given by the bag full as promo material by sales reps, would be easy to locate in the area’s kitchen gadget sections. Again: no. Sure, you can order one online but like many of these items, the extra delivery charge is insane: a 96¢ scraper comes with a $7.95 delivery. Forget that! So I’m still looking around for one.

In the meantime, though, I made one from the lid of a cheap dollar store plastic container; a little creative surgery and presto, a makeshift bowl scraper. It works OK although a bit flimsy. But dang it sure helps get the dough out of the bowls cleanly. For scraping the counter top clean or cutting lumps of dough into sections, I have a very useful metal scraper…