(knife rasping) - Oh, my God, so good, so fluffy. (energetic music) - Baking bread at home can
be a little bit intimidating but it's getting more and
more popular every day. - We have a ton of bread
recipes to choose from, but each of them requires specific pieces of bread-making gear. - Lisa and I are gonna show you some of our favorite bread-making tools to help you in your request
for the perfect loaf. - [Lisa] First up, Hannah. (energetic music) - So we tested eight dry
food storage containers and this brand from Cambro won and it was just super easy to use, The markings were clear and
simple, the lid was simple, it's super rugged and
it also perfectly stores a five-pound bag of flour, which is a standard size in America, so you can just dump your flour in there and then you can access it really easily. This is actually a really
tidy way to store dry goods, but it's also awesome for baking bread, often a recipe will say, you know, leave for two hours or until
the loaf has doubled in size. Well, it's like, I can never remember what it
looked like in the first place. So this, you can actually
go by the measurements. You know, you can watch it expand and track when it's
actually doubled in size, which is super handy. All right, so I am doing one
of our easiest bread recipes, it's called almost no-knead bread. Last night, I mixed
together dry ingredients, flour, salt and yeast with water, a little bit of vinegar and a
little bit of beer, that's it. Mixed it together until it was shaggy, honestly, didn't look that good, I was a little bit worried about it, but it looks great today. So you wait like 8 to 18 hours, so it's been about 18 hours for me, dump it out onto a floured surface. It's called almost no-knead, because it asks you to knead
it 10 to 15 times right now. So there's the almost. So after you knead it, you
put it onto the parchment, the parchment helps it not
stick to the Dutch oven and this is our winning
parchment paper right here from King Arthur. We tested 10 different
brands of parchment paper, you know, some were rolls,
some were pre-cut sheets. Some of the pre-cut ones were too big, so you're still cutting it down to size, it doesn't make it any easier. This one is like, ooh, it's
like a perfectly tailored suit, you whisk it out, you put it right into
your own baking sheet and it fits perfectly. Okay, I think that's been 10 to 15 kneads, This has a little bit of oil on it, put the dough right here like that. This parchment paper truly is (chuckles) one of the best winners, one of my favorite winners we have I'm absolutely obsessed with it. So the next piece of
bread baking equipment I wanna talk about is a Dutch oven, which if you are a fan of ATK, you know we love our Dutch ovens. I have our winner here by Le Creuset. I actually did this testing, I got some serious guns in this testing 'cause if you've ever hefted a Dutch oven, you know they're really heavy. We tested 10 cast iron
models and one ceramic model, and I included the ceramic
model because it was lighter and I thought maybe it would have the same
heat retention properties, but it wouldn't be so hard to lift, But unfortunately ceramic is fallible and I actually broke the lid when I was washing it in the sink, so we really think cast iron
is worth it for a Dutch oven, you get that superior heat retention, and it's not gonna break in the same way. Of all the models I tested,
primarily enamel coated ones, which is actually, it's a kind
of glass on the surface here. Le Creuset, our winner
has some gorgeous colors, it's probably the most fun part of buying a Le Creuset,
picking out the color, but we also have a best
buy from Cuisinart, that was really good. And we also tested the
Amazon Basics model, and it was pretty darn good too. I tested one model that was uncoated, just a classic Lodge, like what a cowpoke might
have on the range over a fire and I actually love that one too. You know, for usability reasons, I do prefer a light interior,
let me show you this. The interior here is
this sort of beige color and you can see into it better, so like if you're browning chunks of beef in one with a black uncoated interior, it's hard to see, like,
is it over browned? Is it beautiful? You know, you can't tell. With these you can really
gauge the browning better. That said, the uncoated,
classic Lodge model, made gorgeous bread, it was
really good for browning. And that is why we really love Dutch ovens for this recipe of almost no-knead bread, because some professional kitchens actually have steam ovens and what that helps with is spring. It helps the loaf of bread spring up. So when you use a cast-iron
Dutch oven in a bread recipe, you're actually creating a mini steam oven because the steam from the
bread cooking can't escape and the lid is so heavy and the whole thing retains heat so well, so you're creating a mini steam
oven, which is super cool. And then you put it in for
30 minutes for this recipe with the lid on, and then you take the lid off
for the second 30 minutes, and you get that gorgeously
brown, crusty exterior. The net stage where this Dutch oven is gonna come in super handy,
I'm gonna take the lid off, and I am going to put, pick
this up like little sling and put it right in here. So as you'll see, this is paper and it might kind of wig you out like, "Oh my God, you're putting
paper in the oven?" But this is heat safe
to a higher temperature it's not going to burst into flames, so don't worry, it will
get a little darker, it will get discolored, but don't worry, you're not gonna burn your house down. Well, you might, but it won't
be the parchment's fault. So at this stage of the recipe, we cover this and we set
it aside for two hours or until the loaf doubles in size and doesn't readily spring
back when poked with a finger. So this needs two hours, but yesterday I actually made another loaf so I could show you all the results, let me go get it. I have it here on our
winning cooling rack, you really have to use a cooling rack, If you just put it on a surface that isn't ventilated like
that, it's gonna get soggy, you really need that airflow. So I'm gonna do a little
(knocks) knock-knock right here, ooh, you can see it's nice and hollow, the bottom is gorgeously
browned and not one bit soggy and that really comes down
to using a cooling rack. So this is our winner
here by Checkered Chef, we love that grid pattern
and it's super durable, so that's why it won our testing. Now let's check out Lisa's
favorite bread gear. (upbeat tropical music) - So when you're baking bread. You can do measurements of flour and water and all those things with measuring cups, but what makes it super, super easy and way more precise is
to use a digital scale. And this is our favorite it's by OXO. We tested 10 digital scales and we did all kinds of
things, testing their accuracy, and how easy they were to use and clean. This one is our winner, it's been our winner for quite a while. So one of the things we
love about this scale is the platform. It comes right off for cleaning and it's stainless steel,
it's very easy to wipe clean and once it's clean, you
pop it right back on, and that's it. The other thing we love about this scale is this part out front. The controls are all in the front and it has this little pull-out reading. If you have a great big bowl on here and you can't see the reading underneath the edge of the bowl, you're not down there trying to read it, you pull it right out and it
slides right back into place. It's also got a super
dead-simple control panel. It has a button that just
changes between pounds and grams. So you can just switch in one second between the two measurements. A lot of the scales we tested had these little tiny switches
buried deep in the workings, and you had to choose one or the other almost for all time
because it was such a pain. This is in one second flat, so I'm gonna be measuring
the things that I need for our almost no-knead sourdough 2.0, which was a recipe that we developed during quarantine this past year. We kept making improvements on it, our test cook, Andrew
Janjigian is a bread expert, he now has his own blog called Wordloaf, and he developed this recipe to use just a tiny amount of
flour for your starter, because if you remember,
flour was kind of hard to get. So this is my tiny starter, this has day one, April 2nd, 2020 on it. And I've kept it going for,
you know, all these months because it's so easy. So we call for 1 1/4
cups, plus 2 tablespoons, or 11 ounces of water at 70 degrees. I actually have my measuring cup. Now, rather than trying to measure out 1 1/4 cups and two tablespoons, that's not that hard, but
this is so much easier. I put it on here, I zero out my scale, I can pour this in right
until it says 11 ounces. so there we go, that's exactly
the amount of water I need, and the scale made that so easy. I'm zeroing out the weight of my bowl and I'm supposed to be
putting in 3 1/3 cups of flour or 18 1/3 ounces or 519 grams. So easy, I'm just dumping
the flour in there till it reads the right amount. Boom, I did it, ha. (chuckles) So that's my flour, I've already measured out
a teaspoon and 3/4 of salt, just table salt, it's
going right in there. So now here comes the fun part, here's the next tool that I invested in that made bread making so much easier. This is called a dough whisk
and it's just this spiral, it's a little swirl. This one's by King Arthur
Flour, it's our favorite and you're gonna use this
to mix the ingredients. At this stage, if you were mixing these, you've got your water,
your flour, your starter, it just, it's very
gummy, it's very sticky, it's gonna get all over your hands, all over your wooden spoon, you're gonna be spending all this time trying to scrape it off, and honestly, you end up losing
some of that precious dough that you don't wanna lose, you wanna make that into
bread so you can eat it later. So the first stage of this recipe is you're adding that water to a big bowl and then you're adding
your starter to that. And here is my sourdough
starter, it's about two ounces. I'm using our favorite little jar scraper by Get It Right, GIR. This is great 'cause
it's really pretty good at sweeping up every last
little piece of that. If you're measuring it down
to those precise amounts, you want it all to come out of the bowl. I've got my water with my starter in it, my salt and my flour. I'm gonna use this dough
whisk to mix that together and just get the salt kind of
distributed through the flour. And now I just put the
two things together. Now, if you use a wooden
spoon or your hands, this just gets to be a mess, it gets all over everything
and it doesn't mix that well and you waste a lot of flour and dough. So this dough whisk, 'cause this is the genius
moment of this thing. You're putting this in, and it blends the wet
and dry very effectively. It's so much easier and the dough whisk comes
clean without wasting any of the precious, yummy
dough that you're making. I've mixed the dough till
it's pretty moistened, most of the flour and water
and it comes pretty clean, that's it. I don't have, half my dough
going out with a spoon. Okay, so at this point, you're just gonna be mixing it by hand until all the dry
ingredients are incorporated. This recipe does not
call for a stand mixer. A lot of people think you need
a stand mixer to make bread, you do in some cases and here's my stand mixer right back here. We tested tons of stand
mixers, we used them on bread, our winner is the
KitchenAid 7 Quart Pro Line and the inexpensive choice is the KitchenAid Classic
Plus 4-and-a-half Quart. Both of those are great, and they're really good for
certain kinds of recipes. Bagels or bagel bread, they're very stiff, very dry dough that has to be
kneaded for 10 solid minutes, and unless you're a
glutton for punishment, get your stand mixer. Very high hydration doughs
that are very wet and sticky, also good to do in a stand
mixer because otherwise you're just gonna be
coating yourself in dough and it'll be a mess. A lot of our recipes, you
know, your hands and a bowl. So this dough is now in
sort of a rough ball, it's shaggy as they say. So what I like to do at this stage is just cover it with our
favorite plastic wrap, which is nice and clingy,
it's called Stretch-Tite. You can do this or you
can put it in a Cambro as Hannah did. At this step, another choice that's more environmentally
friendly than plastic wrap, would be the Abeego bees
wrap that Hannah talked about in our episode on plastic alternatives. And I'll just write the time on the top and then I know when to come back and look for this bread
to be doubled in size. it'll just look like really nice dough and it'll be slightly
domed, a little bubbly, it'll just look like really nice dough and it's ready for next stage. So this is a sheet of King
Arthur parchment paper that I have cut into a 12-inch square because t an even shape to drop into the Dutch oven. And then at this point you
can use vegetable spray, I just use a little bit of
olive oil and a pastry brush. This is our winning pastry brush by OXO, it's a silicone pastry brush. And I just brush the
little piece of parchment with my olive oil. And this is going to drop the bread right into a red-hot Dutch oven, which I have heating up in my oven. I just took this colander
out of the fridge, my dough has been in
there for 12 to 24 hours and this is our winning
colander by RSVP Endurance, it's a stainless steel colander. This is the larger size that we call for and we're gonna put it in
a full-sized Dutch oven. My Dutch oven is a little small and I have the smaller colander, so the same dough, it just
goes into a smaller shape, it makes it a little taller, but it makes the bottom fit
into my smaller Dutch oven. And this is the same piece of
plastic I used on the bowl, so I'm not wasting plastic. And so there it is, it's all beautiful sitting right in there, I will show it to you. And that's all ready to go and I'm just gonna take
that greased parchment, put it right there and flip it over gonna peel off my towel and there it is. And now we are going to do
an exciting thing. (chuckles) We're gonna do the slashing. This is called a lame and it's a tool that bread makers use to get those nice, little slashes in bread and what that does is release
the tension of the surface so that as the bread rises,
it's able to split apart and create those yummy zones
where there's crispy ridges and sort of stretched-looking parts. And you'll often see people
do very decorative sourdoughs, this is what they're using to
cut a pattern into this dough, it's almost formed a skin on top. So you're gonna release some of that so that the bread can really blow up. It's basically a razor blade, old-school razor blade on a stick. This one's shaped like a
little bread loaf, a baguette, it's by Breadtopia, it's our favorite. We tested several of these and we liked this one the best, found it the easiest to
use to change the blades and to just keep going
with, so it's great. You don't wanna cut straight down, you wanna cut in a kind
of a 45-degree angle and you wanna go about a half inch in, 'cause you wanna cut through
that sort of toughened skin and let this thing expand and when you cut it in a 45-degree angle, and you get that little lip that's crispy that I really love. If you wanna make other cuts, you can make very precise, little cuts in a decorative pattern
and they will open up, but for a main cut like this, 45 degrees. I'm going straight across the
loaf at a 45-degree angle, about a half inch in and there it is. So the lame, it's spelled
L-A-M-E, like lame, but it's pronounced lame,
because it's French. I am gonna take this now and
get my red-hot Dutch oven out of my oven where it's
been preheating for an hour and I'm gonna drop this in
and put it back in the oven. So this is my super-hot Dutch
oven, taking off the top. I'm using the parchment as a sling. Now, unlike Hannah's recipe
where she's putting it into a cold Dutch oven,
this one goes in hot, and you take the bread out to slash it and get it ready to go right
from the fridge, so it's cold, and that makes a difference. So I'm gonna put this in the oven and we'll take a look later on. (lively music) Here's my finished loaf. Isn't it cute? I really think that making
this bread is so much, it's so, what's the word? It's kind of fulfilling, you feel like you've done something and you get something delicious to eat. So I really don't mind that sourdough is kind of an investment, you're growing starter for a long time, you're messing around and
trying to get it to the point where it will really rise a loaf of bread. If you want a faster, easier one, then that almost no-knead
bread that Hannah made, anyone could do it and
it's super delicious, but this one takes a little
more dedication and time to getting it all together. Once you've got it, it's very easy. So isn't it cute? And you can see across the top here, that was that single slash I made, look how much it opened up and allowed this bread to expand and rise and gives you this nice,
little crusty edge here that's just so good. So it just looks pretty
and it looks fancy, even though all I did was cut across it. I love that kind of thing, so here it is. And I've got our trusty bread knife. (knife rasping) Oh my God, so good, so fluffy, so soft in the inside and
crusty on the outside, and I eat the heel 'cause
that's my favorite part. (bread crunching) That is so good. So I think this bread is delicious and all those little
tools that I talked about, the lame, the whisk, the scale, they made it easier and
they made it more efficient and they just kind of helped
me level up my bread game. - So like I said, I was a little bit
intimidated to bake bread, especially stuff that's
gonna be shown on video, but it was really easy
and fun and rewarding and the bread looks good,
so I'm super excited. So if you're a novice like me, I would suggest starting
with the multiuse gear, invest in a Dutch oven, it's great for a million different things. Same with Cambro's, cooling
racks, parchment paper, these aren't one-trick ponies and honestly, just have fun with it. - Like Hannah said, those multipurpose tools
like the Dutch oven, is a great place to start, but as you start making more bread and I've been doing this
for a long time now, a few of these extra pieces of equipment really make a difference and the end game is a great loaf of bread. So for the recipes that
you saw us bake today, go to americastestkitchen.com and for more information on
the products we talked about, check out the links below. - Yes and please ask us any of your bread-tool-related
questions in the comments and don't forget to hit
that subscribe button. (joyful relaxing music)
