This sourdough gift guide a comprehensive guide for sourdough lovers. These items are perfect for the ‘not-so-beginner’, offer kitchen appliance upgrades and to take homemaking to the next level.
It can be hard to shop for a home baker. You know they have their own sourdough starter from scratch, a mixing bowl, and flour. Which poses the question – what is the best sourdough gift guide for someone who has ‘everything’?
Let me introduce you to the sourdough gift guide, for advanced bakers. If I were starting my sourdough journey over again, these are the items I would have loved to receive.
This is an advanced sourdough starter kit which goes beyond the basics and offers upgrades or items someone may not already have. These are some of the best gift ideas for your favorite baker.
Whether this is a sourdough gift guide for her or him, you will find a thoughtful gift everyone will love. And at a variety of price ranges!
Gift Guide for a Sourdough Baker
We use our cast iron skillet for so many sourdough baked good recipes. From sourdough english muffins, to sourdough whole wheat pizza crust and even sourdough discard garlic knots, a cast iron skillet is a must.
A banneton is another bowl for sourdough bread to rise in. While bread proofing baskets are not necessary, they can provide shape and structure to a loaf. While not essential (any mixing bowl will do), they are easy to clean, stack and store.
A banneton basket comes in both an oval shape and a round shape. It is perfect gift to for your bread maker to – well, make homemade bread!
Our family has two dutch ovens. We like our Le Creuset Dutch Oven – which is essentially an enameled cast iron dutch oven! A traditional sourdough boule is cooked in a dutch oven as it helps to create steam while the bread is cooking. A bread oven lends to a moist bread with a seriously crunchy exterior. A new pair of oven mitts can also be helpful!
This dough whisk makes stirring baked goods easy. The specific design helps to move dough easier than a whisk and incorporate air while mixing. It can often replace the need for a kitchenaid mixer (at least while stirring the initial ingredients).
A thermometer can tell you if the interior of your bread is cooked. Sometimes it can be difficult to see from the outside if the inside is done or if the crust is hard or burnt. Temp checking your loaves of bread can be another sign of “done-ness” – leading to the perfect loaf.
Having a bench scraper (aka pastry cutter / dough scraper) will help you to divide dough easily. We use this to cut bagels and bread with ease. It also helps to remove bread dough from the counter (aka bench), so you can transfer the dough to a pan to cook.
A razor blade can more scoring bread easier and more detailed. Kitchen scissors and a sharp knife also do the trick. You can also let your sourdough bread naturally crack without putting a cut in your loaf. It is pretty beautiful to see the breaking point- aka where the weakest point of the bread is!
While a kitchenaid mixer is not a requirement for baking, it does make it easier to form gluten within dough (thanks to the dough hook attachment). There are a lot of pros and cons to kitchenaid mixers. The debate is out there on which one is better- bowl lift or tilt head.
I have a refurbished bowl lift Kitchenaid mixer which I absolutely love (especially the under $500 price tag as this item is a bit of a splurge). Some people also like the bosch mixer brand.
An oven thermometer can be helpful if you are having trouble with a loaf of bread cooking incorrectly. It can help you understand if the stove is hotter or cooler than it seems, making the bread interior gummy or raw and the exterior hard. This is a great tool which helped our family understand our gas oven gets 25 degrees hotter than it is set to which impacts overall cook times.
As an added bonus, when making your starter from scratch you can see how long your oven light should be on to have optimal temperatures and success in creating a low waste starter within 7 days or less.
Though it sounds silly, a designed bread knife with a sturdy handle can give you equal slices of bread. It can also help prevent crushing your sourdough loaf while cutting slices. It took me two years before buying this amazing purchase!
- A personalized recipe card holder
Sometimes it is just better to hold the recipes in one place (or follow this collective sourdough board on Pinterest for more sourdough discard recipe inspiration!).
A bread bag is a great way to store your homemade sourdough bread. There are many DIY ideas on the internet and also some for purchase. The benefit of a bread bag is freshness and the reusable factor over a plastic ziplock bag. As long as you put your bread in completely cooled it can last up to a week on the countertop. This is the perfect budget friendly (even DIY) sourdough gift guide idea.
Purchasing a grain mill makes it easy to make fresh-milled flour yourself. Whether you grow the wheat berries (or other grains) in your own garden, or purchase them in bulk, you can save money.
Having a grain mill also ensures the flour used within a recipe is the most packed with nutrients. It uses all three parts of the wheat berry (bran, germ and endosperm).
Store bought grains remove the bran and germ, leaving you with all purpose flour. And whole wheat flour does leave the endosperm, however the quantities are less than fresh ground wheat berries.
One of our frugal kitchen tips is to buy flour in bulk. For long term food storage, it is important to consider stockpiling the baking essentials – flour and sugar! Not only is it cheaper to buy flour in bulk, but it is an easy way to ensure your family will not run out for a little while (should there be any flour shortages).
Mylar bags keep flour fresh for 10-15 years. It prevents sunlight and moisture from getting into the flour. And it also stops any growth of insects or eggs by removing the oxygen (if an oxygen absorber is placed within the bag).
One of our favorite purchases of this year are silicone muffin tins! It saves our family from buying extra muffin tins – and it makes the muffins easier to eat (for little ones) because there is no muffin tin to peel away from the finished product.
Simply oil or butter the muffin tin and place within the oven. They are easy to clean and do not bake up any different than other baking pans. Other fun baking pans include a bakers couche, a pie plate, cake pans and bread pans.
Sometimes, we bakers, are not the best dish cleaners and our trusty baking utensils need a refresh. Another great option includes a new set of glass bowls, a reusable mat, rolling pins, a bread mat, and a new wooden spoon.
What is your favorite baking essential for making sourdough? My personal favourite is our new bread knife (which we now consider an essential tool). Let us know what you would put in this sourdough gift guide in the comments below!
