Watch, Read, Listen

Every autumn the same question lands in our inbox: which butter churn actually works? A butter churn is a vessel with a crank, a dasher, or a motor that agitates heavy cream until the fat clumps into butter and the buttermilk separates off. That mechanism has not meaningfully changed in a couple of hundred years,…

Best bread cloche bakers fall into two very different camps: heavy cast iron that doubles as cookware, and light stoneware or aluminium built purely for dough. We baked in all ten of the options below across repeated sourdough, batard and sandwich-loaf batches, and the winner is the Northriver Casting 9 by 5 inch cast iron…

If you want one book that covers the whole craft, the best bread baking books buying decision starts with Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast, which explains dough, fermentation and shaping in plain language and then gives you algorithms you can repeat. We picked it because it does something the free recipe sites do not:…

A bottom loading water dispenser stores its 3 or 5 gallon jug in a lower cabinet and pumps water up into hot and cold reservoirs, so you never lift or flip a jug that weighs 40 pounds or more. I spent weeks putting eight of them through the same routine in a kitchen, a break…