7 Great Gifts for Your Sourdough Baker

This week, I was looking for a gift bakers would enjoy, and I stumbled upon the list of “25 Gifts Every Bread Baker Wants!” written by Aysha at truesourdough.com. While it caught my attention, her post got me thinking about the difference between wants and needs, so this is my take on gifts for the baker in your life needs, even if that baker is you.

Previously, we made two lists of needs and wants, but these were more exhaustive and not essential in nature. This post is about things a baker deserves. Like the person who has to have a toolbox for car repair, not all tools are equal, nor are they often needed. So, this list is what we think your baker really needs this holiday season.

Gift Suggestion #1- Cast Iron Dutch Oven or Combo Cooker

At Abigail’s Oven, we bake thousands of loaves of sourdough bread every week, and they are all baked in their covered Dutch oven, which makes this our number one pick in gifts. Chad Robertson, who owns Tartine Bakeries and is the author of “Tartine Bread,” is essentially our mentor when it comes to sourdough bread baking, writes:

“For the Basic Country Bread and the other breads …you will need the following kitchen tools: a digital scale for metric measures, a small scoop for flour, a thermometer, a wide bowl for mixing, a rubber spatula, a dough spatula, and a bench knife. At Tartine, we use a wide metal bowl to mix the ingredients with the least amount of mess. For baking the Basic Country Bread and other loaves, you will need a dutch oven combo cooker.”

Chad Robertson,Tartine Bread

Dutch ovens are the most common baking container in successful sourdough home baking. They are versatile, and in addition to bread baking, they are easy to use for stews, Sunday roasts, casseroles, and other one-pot oven dishes, which makes them a very practical gift for your baker.

At Abigail’s Oven, each loaf of sourdough bread is baked in a 10-inch Dutch oven. We use over 200 of them on each baking day, turning out thousands of handmade loaves each week. Ours are all cast iron, but any Dutch oven with a lid holding the moisture of the bread will work. That way, you will not have to add steam to your oven while baking.

But Chad Robertson writes:

However, he prefers a cast iron combo cooker for the best home results. “One part is a shallow frying pan, and the other is a deep pan; each can act as a lid for the other. I like to bake bread on a shallow pan covered with a deep pan. The low walls make it easy to score the loaf before baking, and the deep pan used as a cover gives the loaf room to rise. Any Dutch oven will work fine—ensure you can cover the pan with a secure lid to seal.”

“I love using my Lodge Combo Cooker when baking sourdough bread because it provides the ideal steamy environment for yielding a loaf with the perfect oven spring, “Amy said, “I have found that lightly spritzing my dough ball with water right before popping it in the oven increases the oven spring and provides the perfect crackled and crispy crust. The craftsmanship of the Lodge Combo Cooker locks this additional moisture in, perfectly emulating commercial ovens, which inject steam during the baking process.”

Amy Duska, Amy in the Kitchen

Of course, these are available on Amazon and from a leading cast-iron cookware manufacturer, Lodge. And, “if you are on a budget, then the Lodge branded Dutch ovens provide excellent quality for the price and give great bread results too. I know this from experience, as it’s the brand I used for a long time… I bought [mine] from Amazon and loved it,” reports Aysha from TrueSourdough.com

Gift Suggestion #2- Food Thermometer

Getting the perfect loaf means getting both the right dough and baking temperatures. For years, I trusted my home to be “room temperature,” but during the summer and winter months, it wasn’t always the same. And my oven was not as hot as the bakery’s, even though we are at about the same altitude. That led to a lot of experimentation and poor-quality results.

I had read that an instant-read food thermometer would be a handy kitchen gadget for meat and bread, too. It would help me, as a baker, seriously begin refining my bread-making hobby. So, I ordered one on Amazon, like this one, that takes the internal temperatures of meat and baked goods fast.

It was okay, and I thought I was happy with it, but it was inexpensive, and the probe fell out of the casing just a few months after my purchase. The price was so low that I began to think of it as disposable, so I ordered another.

But then I was introduced to Thermoworks products, and at that time, I did not know that they are all we use at the bakery. First, I got their Thermapen® ONE, which was quite impressive. Then, shortly thereafter, I purchased their BlueDOT^® Alarm Thermometer, which even had Bluetooth^® Wireless Technology.

Now, this was a game-changer! I no longer opened the oven door to check if the bread was done; I could just look at the readout. Best of all, its alarm and Bluetooth connection made it easy to go about my day until the alarm went off, telling me my dough was 205°F | 96°C.

Gift Suggestion #3- Bakers Weighing Scale

At the bakery, we weigh all our ingredients. It is an easy way to expand or reduce a recipe and still get consistent results. But there are many choices, so many that I now have two. However, if you lean on reviews like this one from Wirecutters, you may find the perfect scale for your baker.

They report, “After years of research and testing, we’re confident that the Escali Primo Digital Scale is the best. It’s among the fastest and most accurate scales we tested …a good kitchen scale might be your secret weapon for consistent cookies, perfectly risen bread, or a lofty souffle. It gets your baking down to a science, [and] we’re confident that [this] is the best, …fastest, and most accurate scales we tested, and it remains powered on for longer than most others before automatically shutting off.”

However, learning to use baker’s percentages (see #3 here) is a turn-off to some bakers. “That’s where you get to be the hero and buy a scale that automatically measures bakers percentages,” reports Aysha. “The My Weigh 8000 kitchen weighing scale measures all your baking ingredients AND calculates bakers’ percentages. Win-win!”

I enjoy math and Baker’s percentages, so my Escali is great!

Gift Suggestion #4- Bench Knife or Scraper

For the longest time, I refused to use our granite countertops to make bread because of the mess they left. Then Martha shared two tricks with me: first, oil the counter with olive oil, and second, use a bench knife. Both of these made all the difference when I was tensioning my dough.

Who knew these were available as close as your nearest Walmart? They cost even less on Amazon, but the metal edges still worried me. So, while I have two metal scrapers, I have five plastic ones, which only cost a dollar online or at many grocery stores. And you can even make one on your own.

But if you are really into expensive gifts, Jim Challenger sells a luxury bench knife on his website. This one is nice enough to be passed on from one baker per generation to the next. It’s a solid walnut bench knife that would make an excellent gift for your bread baker. But watch out, going to his site tempts any baker to buy more!

Gift Suggestion #5- Serrated Slicing Knife

Another must-have is a “perfect slice” bread knife, long, sharp, and serrated. We use long offset bread knives like the one on the left picture below at the bakery. But whatever you select, it must be long enough to reach through your biggest boule easily. And it needs to be sharp and serrated to “allow the blade to slice easily through bread with simply a gentle sawing motion,” explains the folks at Out of the Woods of Oregon, who make a “fiddle-bow” bread slicer, which is pictured on the right here.

The fiddle bow bread slicer is my choice, while Aysha’s is the Saken 10″ Serrated Bread Knife. She thinks it “is brilliant as a gift. It’s durable, effective, slices bread beautifully and effortlessly, and comes in a beautiful gift box.” However, she continues, “If you‘re on a budget, then the Mercer knife is an absolute bargain and has great performance. Make it a little more special by buying the knife guard to go with it. It’s super great value and completes the gift as a ‘set.’ The guard will help protect the knife’s blade while not in use. A great gift at a great price!”

Gift Suggestion #6- Bread Lame

If I had had a good knife, I may not have ever purchased a bread lame; knives are all we use at Abigail’s Oven to score bread, and that is all a bread lame is good for. But for most of us, once we get a knife like the one listed above, we will be happy to score our bread dough with that.

However, a lame makes scoring easy and very professional. As Aysha writes, “Receiving a great quality lame like this walnut-trimmed one …feels really special. It gives that last step in the baking process a super luxurious feel.”

Again, she continues, “The other option is to go for a lame that will help bring out a creative side to bread baking. This UFO lame is a super trendy little lame that is good for making intricate designs and patterns on bread. It’s an excellent way to have some fun with bread and make some really unique and creative designs!”

And, of course, you can make your own,

Gift Suggestion #7- Proofing Baskets

For the longest time, I used a well-floured kitchen towel draped into a bowl. But now it seems I never have enough proofing baskets! It’s one of those things you wish you had loads of to make various sizes and shapes of loaves.

These are also known as bannetons or brotforms. They are usually round or oval, made with natural rattan, and often come with washable cloth liners. The rattan draws out moisture from the skin of the dough, which improves the baking of the outer crust.

Wow! Now that I am at the bottom of the list, I can think of at least seven more things I wish I had. But I am a bit of a hoarder when it comes to baking (e.g., recently, I gave away 10 of the Dutch ovens I had collected from camping over the years). Anyway, stay tuned for my seven wants that your baker might like, too.