Equipment

We want baking to be as approachable as possible. To achieve this, we try to choose the simplest equipment for home bakers to use that will allow for success. We even encourage you to use your hands! They’re great tools. If you come to our baking school, you’ll see that it’s relatively humble. We often use just a metal bowl, a fork, a wooden spoon, and a plastic scraper. Stand mixers are a rarity and are never a part of bread-making classes.

Some of us like our equipment, though. And some of us need it for a variety of reasons, so we also tell you how to make these recipes with tools like stand mixers, pastry bags, portioners, and more. For this book, we’ve written many of the sweet recipes assuming that you will want to use a mixer. It is easy to use a bowl and a wooden spoon instead, if you prefer. The bread recipes are mainly written to use a bowl, a spoon, and your hands. A few of the more enriched bread recipes call for a mixer.