Overview:
All of the equipment I will recommend is meant for home use. The prices for some professional bakery equipment can be ridiculous. For example, a simple baker’s mechanical scale can cost $850. Within each category we will offer several alternatives and discuss their pros and cons.
Scales
The two types of scales are the baker’s and the digital. Digital scales can easily change the units being measured. The ingredients list for this course is mostly in ounces, but the tiny amounts of food grade lye for the boiling water for bagels is measured in grams. If you scale the ingredients up you could be working in pounds instead of ounces, or if you prefer, in kilograms. Another advantage of a digital scale is that they can quickly net out the weight of a container. The advantage of the old fashioned baker’s mechanical balance scale is that it is quicker, which is valuable when you are scaling hundreds of pieces. With experience you can sense when the amount is close to the desired weight just by seeing how the indicator needle moves toward the vertical position. Bob has a Salter (UK made) mechanical balance scale that is no longer offered by that company. Amazon has lots of choices for digital scales. Look for one that has fine gradations in the amount measured and a high maximum weight. For example, the scale described below for $15.87 can go up to 33 pounds and has gradations as fine as one gram:
Food Scale -33lb Digital Kitchen Scale for Food Ounces Grams Rechargeable 304 Stainless Steel,Batteries and Type-C Charging
Dough Knives and Lames:
A dough knife/scrapper lets you quickly cut pieces off of a big ball of dough to scale to the weights of individual bagels, rolls, and loaves. A lame is a device for holding a razor to score proofed loaves just before putting them in the oven. If you don’t score a loaf it will crack at random as it expands in the oven. Amazon has lots of inexpensive choices.
Danish Whisk:
I use a Danish Whisk to mix sours. It can be done with an ordinary spoon, but a Danish Whisk is quicker. I appreciate that for a task I am doing so often. Amazon sells them starting at $7.
Stand Mixers
I consider a stand mixer a necessity. The most common mixer is the KitchenAid tilt head. They are sold everywhere. Walmart currently has them on its website for $279 for the 4.5 quart 300 Watt model.
However, with heavy doughs, such as for rye bread, pumpernickel, and bagels, the tilt head mixers are dubious. The least expensive usable mixers for heavy doughs are the smaller lift-bowl KitchenAids, which come in 5.5, 7, and 8-quart bowl sizes. The horsepower motor increases as the bowl sizes go up. The least expensive source for a lift-bowl is on Ebay, which sells a refurbished one for $250. That Ebay is selling hundreds of refurbished lift-bowl KitchenAid mixers provides a hint about their durability.
The top-of-the line KitchenAid lift bowl stand mixer has stainless a steel dough hook and pastry beater, so you don’t have to worry about pieces of enamel chipping off. The sad truth is that even their top-of-the-line model is marginal for making bagels, the toughest dough on a mixer because has a dense and strong (meaning tightly elastic) dough. Bob has burned through several KitchenAid lift-bowl mixers. Once they jam, their motors burn off their lubricating grease. The inherent weakness of the KitchenAid mixer design is the planetary gearing that transfers the motion of the horizontal drive shaft to the vertical dough hook. It lacks the required torque. The problem is so prevalent that KitchenAid mixers now come with a warning to limit mixing of any yeast dough made with a dough hook to speed 2 of the 10 speeds and to let the mixer rest after ten minutes.
A work-around to the limitations of KitchenAid lift-bowl mixers is to mix the dough until just before the mixer starts to jam and then pull the dough out and finish mixing it by hand. This is an iffy work-around because you have to stay by the mixer to catch it before it jams and it is very labor intensive to finish kneading the dough by hand.
There are three stand mixers meant for home use that avoid this design flaw. They are the Swedish-made Ankarsrum and the German-made Bosch Universal and the Chinese made Ooni. The prices of the high-end KitchenAid, the Anksarsrum and the Bosch machines are similar. The Ooni is the most expensive. The top-end KitchenAid is $1,000 (8 quarts), the Ankarsrum is $800 (7.5 quarts) and the Bosch is $509 (6.5 quarts) with a stainless steel bowl. The Ooni is $800 (7.3 quarts). There is a decent Bosch mixer with a plastic bowl at $450 at Pleasant Hill Grain. I haven’t used the Bosch or the Omni, which is brand new. Both the Ankarsrum and the Bosch are sold by Pleasant Hill Grains, which Bob can attest to having very good service on parts and for giving advice on the phone. Be advised, the Ankarsrum is slower for mixing than the KitchenAid. However, its usable bowl capacity is twice as large as the most common lift-bowl KitchenAid mixers, so the production speed is the same if you are making more than one batch. The Bosch, Ankarsrum, and Ooni can be filled while the machine is running, which also speeds up the work. There are a lot of used KitchenAids for sale. The only used Ankarsrum I found on eBay was $650. There was a used Bosch (no stainless bowl) on eBay for $349.
One indicator of a stand mixer’s build quality and thus its expected life is its warranty. The Anksasrum’s warranty is for seven years. The Ooni’s is for five years. Bosch’s is for three years on the motor and transmission and one year on all other parts. The KitchenAid Pro is for one year (ouch!).
Ovens
Advice on ovens is probably irrelevant, unless you need to replace your oven. Bob replaced a GE Cafe built-in 30-inch oven in his kitchen in 2020. This oven could not be repaired when it was eight years old because GE no longer made parts for it. GRRRR! He was furious about the lack of support of what GE had termed a high-end product. He bought a Viking French door oven as a replacement. This purchase was during the pandemic, when there was a shortage of semi conductors. His wait for delivery was eight months. Bob picked this oven because: it had the largest interior among 30 inch built-in ovens; opening one door automatically opened the other (leaving one hand free to hold a tray of baked products); it was based on the Blodgett Commercial oven made by the same company; and, because it had a lot of features. He wouldn’t buy it now, not because there was anything wrong with it or that it didn’t meet his expectations. The reason is that the price has gone way, way up. It is now (2025) $8,000. He paid $4,500 for it in 2020.
In 2023 year Bob bought a Frigidaire brand double built-in oven for the kitchen in his basement (where the class will be taught). It was only $2,400 for the pair at Home Depot. It doesn’t have all of the features of the Viking. He particularly misses the bread proofing setting in the Viking. There are work arounds for ovens that do not have a proof setting. A proof setting holds the temperature around 90 degrees.
On the plus side for the Frigidaire, it has a fan in front of the heating element at the back of the oven. That makes it a convection oven. His Viking is also a convection oven. In convection ovens a fan circulates the hot air throughout the oven. Convection ovens get more top browning at a given temperature setting and duration of baking. The Viking has a more powerful heating element. It can even be used as an air fryer. The bottom on the Fridigaire has a basin for pouring hot water to create steam. In the Viking I have to put a large pan in the bottom of hold the hot water.
Proofing Boxes
Ambient temperature proofing boxes are containers in which the dough rises. The first proofing, also called the bulk proofing, is before the dividing and scaling. Proofing boxes used to be made of pine wood. I couldn’t find any that are still made of wood. Plastic boxes are way cheaper and more durable. Whether they are wood or plastic, they are usually covered with corn meal at the bottom to keep the products from sticking. Wheat bran can also used to prevent sticking. I am using ordinary plastic storage boxes. If I could find food-grade plastic boxes in the right dimensions I would use them.
A problem with ambient temperature proofing is that a two-hour proof can turn into a twenty-four hour wait if the ambient temperature is too low. Yeast works best around 90 degrees. That high a temperature can be tricky because if your temperature gets above 105 degrees then the yeast will die and dough will be ruined. You can use an empty oven as a controlled temperature proofing box. Some home ovens, such as my Viking mentioned above, have a proof setting. Failing that, one pot of boiled water can keep an oven at around 80 degrees for hours. Similarly, You can also use your microwave as a proof box. For small doughs you can bring a cup of water to a boil. Put your dough in a covered bowl in the microwave, along with the hot water, and close the door.
If you cannot tie up your oven or microwave to be used as proof box, you can buy a large styrofoam picnic cooler and put in a pot of just-boiled water. Lastly, there are dedicated electrical proofing boxes made for home use. An example on Pleasant Hill Grain’s website is the Brod and Taylor Bread proofer at $219. It folds flat and has precise temperature control.
Baking Surfaces
A steel or cast iron baking surface is called a baking steel, and a ceramic baking surface is called a baking stone. These baking surfaces retain heat. When the products are placed on them in a preheated oven they provide radiant heat that gives the product more crust and more rise. Due to their greater mass, the steel baking surfaces are much better than the baking stones. There are pre-made ones sold in quarter, half, and three-quarters inch thicknesses to set width and depth dimensions. The thicker ones are better. Even better are steel baking stones that are custom sized to the dimensions of your oven. They give you more baking surface.
The optimal ratio of bottom heat to top heat depends on the oven, the oven temperature, the product, and the amount of steam used. There is no way to know the optimal set up without experimenting. If the finished product has too much bottom color while the tops are light, you can try to use the convection function, provided your oven has it. If there is too much top color you can use the lowest rack setting in the oven, preheat the oven steel longer, or use a thicker steel. An online source for baking steels is
A less expensive alternative are the steel baking surfaces marketed as “pizza steel”. They are smaller than the ones marketed for bread and roll baking, as they are meant for a single small to medium pizza. If your bread and roll baking ambitions will fit on a 14″ by 16″ steel, then that will work.
Thermometers
Ideally, you should have two types of thermometers. One is an infrared thermometer that will instantly tell you the temperature of the interior of the oven and of the baking steel. The other is a thin probe thermometer that will tell you if your product is done baking. Experienced bakers can tell if a loaf of bread is done by taking it out of the oven and thumping the bottom. If there is a hollow sound, like banging a drum, then the bread is done. Less experienced bakers rely on a needle probe thermometer and look for an internal temperature in the range of 195 to 200 degrees. Rich doughs with eggs, oil, or butter require a higher temperature, such as 210.
Wire Racks
Wire racks for cooling the products are useful to allow moisture to escape from the bottom of the products. Cooling on wire racks avoids soggy bottoms. Stainless steel is the best.
Ph Testers
The simplest way to tell if a sour is ready for mixing into a dough is that is has doubled in size. You just mark the starting height on the outside of your container (preferably see-through) and keep checking until it has doubled in height. This eyeball test is not completely reliable. What is completely reliable is a Ph Tester. If you are serious about making sourdough breads, then the $140 for one of these devices can be worthwhile. They also require calibration with solutions at known Ph levels, special solutions to keep the tip of the tester wet, and de-ionized water to rinse the tip after each use. Bob’s grand daughter rejected one of his sourdough breads for smelling like old cheese (too acid a sour). On another occasion is daughter said that a sourdough bread was not as good as Seven Stars because it lacked a sour taste (too little acidity). If you have enough sourdough failures then a Ph tester becomes attractive.
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