Pastry mat

Wonderful! This thing is worth it.Two reasons:

1. You can work the dough — to hand-knead a little, to form loaves, to roll out when making olive bread or cinnamon bread — with no added flour to dust your work surface. It makes handling the sticky, high-hydration dough possible. You can see in the video that I hardly have to touch the dough when I form the “log,” and I can just lift the edge of the Roul’Pat and flop the log into the banneton. Wonderful.
2. Because you don’t need to flour a work surface, it reduces clean up. You don’t end up with flour everywhere. Wonderful.

Have I said this thing is wonderful? Click the image to go check it out at Amazon.

Scale

Any bread-baking book you look at emphasizes that weighing the flour is much more accurate than measuring it, and that, in bread-baking, accuracy matters.

So you need a scale. What the books don’t emphasize for the home baker is that scales can be off by 5% and that glass/plastic measuring cups are not so accurate, either.

Van Over’s bread uses 70% “hydration,” which for 500 g of flour means using 350 g of water. It took me a while to learn that my measuring cup did not match my scale: 350 ml of water in my measuring cup weighs 340 g on my scale, which makes a surprising difference in the bread. (I know, it probably means my scale is off, but it doesn’t matter; what matters is that there’s exactly twice as much flour by weight as water.)

Moral: Weigh your water in your measuring cup to see if it and the scale agree.

What kind of scale should you get? Not mine…

Cast-iron rock pan for steam

Sliding ice cubes into a cast-iron pan full of rocks is the safest and easiest way I have come up with to add the essential steam to the beginning of the baking cycle. There’s no boiling water or scalding steam other methods involve.(There is a better way, which I rigged up in an older stove in a house we had 15 years ago: I ran an automobile brake line down the back of the stove that terminated three inches above the oven floor. I put a cast-iron pan full of rocks underneath it and then squirted water down the tube every five minutes. It worked very well, partly because the oven temperature stayed more constant since the door wasn’t being opened to throw in water or ice. But in our new house, I’m reluctant to mess with the stove, and the ice method is working just fine.)

Stones

Years ago, because I wanted to be able to bake two loaves at once, I bought two “Pizza Gourmet” rectangular pizza stones, put a cheap masonry cutoff blade in my radial arm saw, and cut the ends from both of them. I ended up with a surface about the width of my stove.There are lots of other solutions if you want a large surface, unglazed floor tiles for one, but this has worked for me.(Cast-iron rock pan for steam is visible on the floor of the stove.)

Food processors

Two days after posting this site my venerable 15-year-old Cuisinart bit the dust (perhaps literally — there was a lot of flour in the fan intake on the bottom).Research on Amazon, Consumer Reports, and Cooks Illustrated all pointed me toward replacing it with a KitchenAid 12-cup. All agreed it was just marginally better that the 11-cup Cuisinart, so I’d think it doesn’t matter much between the two. All also agreed that food processors made by other outfits just weren’t worth it for kneading dough.And so far, it works great. It’s quieter than my Cuisinart, and it doesn’t jump around on the counter under the stress of kneading.