If you’re going to take up bread baking for more than the occasional loaf, the right equipment makes the job much easier. Although you can find many of the following items in cookware stores, the Kerekes website (bakedeco.com) is hard to beat for one-stop shopping. The San Francisco Baking Institute (sfbi.com/baking-supplies) is also a good source. As you go through the recipes, if you come to a piece of equipment that isn’t familiar, refer back to this section for full details.
There are so many variables in baking, but weighing ingredients accurately takes a big one out of the equation. Professionals prefer metric weights, because the round numbers are easy to scale up or down depending on how many loaves are being made. Because my recipes even use weights for yeast—sometimes as little as 0.1 gram—it would be best to have a kitchen scale accurate down to a tenth of a gram. Several companies make inexpensive kitchen scales with at least this degree of accuracy, including My Weigh, Smart Weigh, and American Weigh. However, if you have a scale that measures only down to the nearest gram, that will also work, because the recipes include a conversion in US measures that you can use for very small amounts of ingredients.
For chopping and grinding nuts, spices, and grains, I find that a high-powered blender makes the job so much easier. Vitamix is my preferred blender, but they are pricey. Any quality high-powered blender will get the job done with nuts, while a coffee grinder works fine with spices and whole grains.
For mixing starters and storing them while they ferment, a 1-quart (1 L) Tupperware container or something similar works well.
You’ll want to have two large bowls: one for the roll and tuck step, and one for the stretch and fold step (I’ll describe both of these steps shortly). The roll and tuck method for developing gluten is much less messy and much more physically accessible with a big mixing bowl. The bowl I use is 23 inches (58 cm) in diameter at the top. If your kitchen is small and you don’t have much shelf space, an 18-inch (46 cm) bowl will work almost as well. Then, after rolling and tucking, and between stretch and fold sequences, you’ll need a container in which to let the dough rest. I recommend a bowl that’s at least 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter at its widest. I prefer stainless steel because it’s light; however, plastic or Pyrex is also fine.
If you hate sticky fingers, you’re going to find bread baking very challenging. Still, you can avoid a lot of stickiness if you work with a plastic bowl scraper. It’s a very useful tool in rolling and tucking any dough. Plus, its shape fits the curve of a bowl, so as its name suggests, you can scrape up every last bit of usable dough. Waste not, want not.