Enter now and discover the primary tools used by a baker, a highly demanded and increasingly qualified profession. From hobbyist to a professional bakery is curiosity, knowledge, experimentation, and proper utensils. Knowing the tools that a baker uses is the first step to being a professional in this sector.
A growing sector that increasingly demands better trained and more qualified professionals. It's a hard but satisfying profession for all who practice it. Today, we will give you hints, tips, and tricks so you can improve, bring out the best in yourself, and master the art of baking.
You will not be able to do something if you do not know all the baker's tools.
The art of bakery: kneading and baking
Baking bread is relatively simple, right? It is just a matter of mixing flour, water, yeast, and salt, putting it all in a mold and in the oven! You already have sliced bread. However, the processes in the bakery, the creation of different types of bread, require much more.
Much of a baker's job is experimentation. A kind of laboratory to try and fail until you find how the dough should look, act and feel throughout the bread-making process. However, not everything has to be left to trial and error.
In creating great bread, the precise measurements, the right ingredients, and the tools that any professional baker uses are just as important. Utensils that make kneading and baking a much more accurate and accessible task.
Discover the main tools used by a baker
There are many tools that a baker uses in his daily work. For example, utensils can be used to obtain a better flavor or different textures in the bread made. Some of them are essential daily, and others are only used in specific cases.
Depending on the type of bread you want to make, you will need one kind of tool or another. For example, to handle sticky doughs in the first steps of kneading, spatulas are necessary to help you during the process.
On the other hand, if you want to facilitate kneading, you can use a kitchen aid at home because you will not have access (probably) to a professional kneading machine with the capacity to work kilos of bread dough.
Here is a list of the main utensils that professional bakers can use throughout their daily work. Of course, there are many more tools to improve the baking process, but, as we said, it depends on the type of bread you want to make.
Weighing machine
The weighing machine in a bakery is not as relevant as in pastry unless you want to do very specific things. For example, a scale allows you to measure the exact amounts of products you need to incorporate to make the bread dough.
As we said, scales are ideal and essential for pastry, where everything has to be much more exact than in a bakery, which allows a little more experimentation with the amounts of each product that we use.
Spatula
We talked about spatulas before. They are handy for the first steps of manual kneading, especially to work with wet masses, and stick easily to surfaces.
Thanks to the spatulas, you can take off the table and lean on it to go turning it and kneading it until it ends up not sticking at the moment in which the flour develops gluten, which gives body to the dough.
Boles
Another fundamental element among a baker's tools is the mixing bowl. And not only to mix the ingredients but to let the dough rest every time we finish with any of the phases of kneading it.
Usually, in the bakery, metal bowls are used to mix the ingredients and, sometimes, specific bowls to let the dough rest and increase its size so that it rises.
Thermometers
Thermometers can better control the oven temperature and the doughs' internal temperature. Remember that some doughs need certain temperatures for the yeast to activate and grow enough to achieve the desired bread.
Cooling racks
Another tool that a baker or pastry chef uses is cooling racks. Once the bread has come out of the oven, you have to let it rest somewhere.
For this, there are these grids, which, surely you have seen, that allow the bread to breathe from above and below, achieving a better rest and, consequently, better consistency and flavor.
In the beginning, we were talking about how making sliced bread is relatively simple, and that is the case if you have the right tool. Elongated pans are often the standard choice for bakery professionals.
In pastry making, all kinds of molds are used in terms of shapes and sizes, but the best are medium-depth rectangular ones to make sliced bread.
Kneader
In professional and industrial bakeries, kneading machines usually produce many kilos of product. It is one of the tools used by a baker that makes daily work easier. In a professional bakery, they are usually used to give the first kneading that the bakers then complete giving the final shape to the loaves.
We can have tiny replicas of them at home, which we know as a kitchen aid, small and electric mixers that facilitate the kneading process.
To be a baker, in addition to a passion for dough and mastery of tools and utensils, it is necessary to improve your training and experiment. Knead until you get the ideal texture for each bread or beat and mount until you achieve the perfect sponge dough are techniques that are achieved with a lot of practice.
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