hey guys it's Bettie from BakerBettie.com. now if you aren't familiar with me
I am a trained chef and baking instructor and my goal is to help you be
a better Baker through teaching classic baking techniques and approachable
baking science. now today we are going to be reviewing all of the equipment that
you need to create your own sourdough starter and to start baking bread with
it. now if you are new to this series make
sure you watch the previous video where we talked about what a sourdough starter
is and why you might want to start one of your own. now all of the equipment
that we will be reviewing today will be linked down at the description box so
let's go ahead and dive in. now there are only a few pieces of
equipment that you need for creating your actual sourdough starter and the
first and most important one is a digital scale. now in most baking I would
say that measuring by weight is optional but for bread baking I would say it's
definitely necessary. when you bake bread you really need to be very accurate in
your measurements and as you learn bread baking you will actually find that
measuring by weight is going to make things much simpler. now the second piece
of equipment is a digital thermometer. we're going to be using this to take the
temperature of our water and to take the temperature of our dough. you don't need
a fancy thermometer but you do need one it's really important to be accurate
with your temperatures. and the last piece of equipment that we need for
creating our starter is a container to put our starter in. now you can use any
glass container that you like preferably you do want it to be glass so
that you can see your starter activity and you want it to be at least 24 ounces
in size. now this is my favourite container to use for sourdough starter I
actually get it at IKEA and I really like it because it has a really wide
mouth. the wider the mouth your jar is the easier it is going to be to get in
and out of it when you go to feed your starter. I'm going to link a few
different jar options down in the description box. now ideally you actually
want three of these containers you want one to keep your sourdough starter in a
second one to put your sourdough discard in and then a third clean one that you
can swap out your starter with when you're ready for a clean jar. now another
really handy piece of equipment is one of these little rubber spatulas. it's
absolutely optional but it's really helpful to get down inside your jar and
mix up your sourdough starter. now there are a few additional pieces of
equipment that are helpful when you actually go to bake your bread and the
first two are a bowl scraper and a bench scraper. now a bowl scraper is a flexible
piece of plastic and I use this to help mix my dough as well as getting the
dough out of my bowl and it's really helpful to scrape dough off of your
hands. if you do any mixing with your hands now a bench scraper is really
helpful for dividing your dough, helping to transfer your dough and also it can
help you shape your dough. the next piece of equipment is what is called a Banneton
basket. now this is a wicker basket that bread baker's use to proof their
bread in. this basket is going to help your bread hold its shape and it also
gives that really pretty spiral pattern on the outside of bread that you often
see on sourdough. now this is called a bread lame and essentially it is a razor
blade on the end of a stick and this is absolutely an optional piece of
equipment but they're fairly inexpensive and they're really helpful for precisely
scoring your bread so if you are going to get very serious about bread baking I
would highly recommend one. the razor blade is very sharp and it helps make
really precise cuts in your bread and the last piece of equipment is a Dutch
oven it is extremely helpful for getting a really nice Rise on your bread and to
also get that really nice crispy crust. commercial bread baking ovens have steam
injectors in them so during the first part of baking time there is steam
present in the oven now home ovens do not have this feature so what a Dutch
oven is going to do is the lid is actually going to trap the steam from
the bread inside the pot and it's going to give you that nice steamy environment
so you get a really nice rise on your bread and it kind of mimics what a
commercial oven would do. now additionally you do need to have a few
simple ingredients on hand before we get started and those are whole wheat flour
and an unbleached white flour. now this white flour can be
either bread flour or unbleached all-purpose flour but it does need to be
unbleached or your sourdough starter is not going to work and then the last
ingredient is a rice flour and we won't need that until we start actually baking
bread but we will need that to dust in our Banneton basket. now rice flour can
typically be found in the baking section in your grocery store or sometimes you
can find it by the specialty flours. now that is it for all of the basic
sourdough baking tools .now in the description box I have linked my article
where I go more in depth about each of these tools and I also discuss a few of
my favorite books if you want to go a little more in-depth about sourdough. now
in our next video we are going to dive right into making our own sourdough
starter from scratch and I cannot wait to get started with you. if you have any
questions please leave those down in the comment section and if you like this
video go ahead and give it a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe so you never
miss a video. I'll see you guys next time.