Secret Weapons: tools of the trade

October 14, 2:51 PMDC Baking ExaminerKatherine Sacks

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In the baker's kitchen, there are certain tools that are a must. Armed with the right utensils, any task can be a breeze. While you may not need goggles for cutting onions or heart shaped tongs, that bench scraper will come in handy on more than one occasion. Deciding between the necessary and inessential(or even useless) tools can be difficult, especially with glossy advertisements and celebrity chef endorsements. Here is a list of basic baking tools that will help guide you through your baking needs.

1) Stand or hand held mixer with whisk, hook and paddle attachments. This tool is essential in mixing doughs, whipping eggs, and creaming butter. Kitchen Aid, Hamilton Beach and Cuisinart all make comparable models.

2) Bench Scraper This simple tool is key to scraping down the sides of your mixing bowl, incorporating ingredients into doughs, passing purees through sieves, and cleaning up work surfaces. Pick one up up any cooking supply store.

3)Offset Spatula No baker should leave home without it. This little tool is great for spreading jams, icing cakes, and evenly adding batter to cake pans. A heavy duty one will be a bit more expensive but will have a straighter edge and be more durable.

4)Thermometer Temperature is very important, especially for sugar mixtures for meringues, caramels, and internal bread temperatures. Make sure you have a good, working bakers thermometer.

5)Digital Scale Accurately measuring your ingredients is key to great results. Using weight measurements is more ideal than cups and tablespoons and a good scale is inexpensive and easy to use. Slater makes a good, inexpensive version.

6)Silicon Spatula A flexible, heat proof spatula is wonderful for any task, from stirring curds and creams on the stove top to scraping the bottom of bowls and folding batters.

7)Silicone non-stick baking mat Use this for every baking need and clean up becomes a breeze. Sticky substance easily come off the mats and you can bake cookies, bread or rolls on them and quickly wash the mats, not the sheet trays. The original Sil Pat version are the best.

8)Immersion Blender While this may seem to land in the luxury category, an immersion blender is a great tool for making soups, purees or jams. Kitchen Aid makes one with a whip and chopper attachment that are quite handy, so you can quickly whip creams or chop small amount of toasted nuts.

9)Food Processor While this stretches into the range of not absolutely necessary, this machine can be really helpful, especially when making quick doughs, grinding nuts into meals, making macarons, or making pastes. You can find inexpensive an inexpensive one at Target.

10)The Obvious Basics Mixing bowls, sheet trays, loaf and pie pans. Depending on what you are making, a pie, a loaf of challah, or a batch of cookies, you will need different baking pans and bowls to mix the dough in. Use heavy gage, aluminum, glass, or ceramic baking pans and bowls that fit the size of your needs; they should be larger then the mixture inside of them so you have room to work.