29 Essential Baking Tools for Home Bakers

All bakers need to have the right bakeware to ensure that pastries, breads, and cakes are mixed well and bake evenly. Here’s a list of the essential baking tools for all of your baking needs:

1. 1. Baking sheets: These flat pans with raised edges are ideal for baking cookies, scones, and pastries like croissants—and they also do double-duty as roasting pans for vegetables, fish, and spatchcocked meat. Sheet pans are sometimes referred to as cookie sheets, but a true cookie sheet only has a rolled edge on one side for handling, while the rest of the sides are open to allow for easy transfer of cookies to a cooling rack.
2. 2. Bench scraper: Bench scrapers are invaluable pastry tools that allow you to remove dough that’s stuck on countertops or the insides of bowls. Metal scrapers are most effective for the former; plastic scrapers offer the flexibility required of the latter. You can also use bench scrapers to portion out dough with the ease of a knife and cut eggs into flour to make fresh pasta dough. Learn how to make pasta dough using this recipe from Chef Thomas Keller.
3. 3. Cake pans: You can use nonstick cake pans to bake an inverted cake like a tarte Tatin, or in batches to create towering layer cakes. While cake pans come in various shapes and sizes, the most common is a nine-inch round cake pan, which holds about four cups of batter, and a 9x13 rectangular pan for sheet bakes like brownies.
   
4. 4. Candy thermometer: A candy thermometer is a long, narrow thermometer with a high heat range that measures the temperature of boiling sugar, oil, sauces, and syrups.
5. 5. Cocotte: Also known as a Dutch oven, the lid of this heavy-duty cast-iron pot traps steam, mimicking the effect of a stocked bakery. Use a 12-inch cocotte for making sourdough and other free-form loaves.
6. 6. Cooling rack: A cooling rack is an elevated wire rack that you use to cool cakes, muffins, and breads after baking them. The rack allows air to circulate the baked goods, releasing the residual steam from the baking process, and preventing sogginess.
   
7. 7. Digital scale: A digital kitchen scale takes all the guesswork and eyeballing out of measuring ingredients, allowing for precision down to the smallest decimal point.
8. 8. Food processor: A food processor can grind through the stale bread to make breadcrumbs and blitz herbs and garlic down into a creamy pesto. A food processor is also useful for pulsing cubes of cold butter into dry ingredients to achieve the coarse consistency needed for pie and tart doughs. Most high speed-blenders can stand-in for a traditional food processor.
9. 9. Hand mixer: Use a hand mixer to mix doughs that are too heavy for whipping together by hand but aren’t voluminous enough for the stand mixer, like cookies, brownies, and quick breads. Hand mixers also lessen the chances of overmixing a batter and turning out a dense final bake.
10. 10. Kitchen scissors: Kitchen shears are a useful tool for tasks like cutting through small bones, neatly snipping chewy pizza dough, and scoring loaves of brioche.
11. 11. Lame: In the world of bread baking, the bread lame is an extension of the baker’s hand. This double-edged razor blade is attached to a wand or stick for extra control. Pronounced “lahm,” this tool is useful for scoring loaves efficiently and artfully.
12. 12. Loaf pan: Loaf pans are perfect for making pound cakes, quick breads, shaped pastries like babka, set desserts like panna cotta, flan, or mousse, or savory dinners like meatloaf. To make a perfectly square loaf of French pain de mie, or any standard sandwich bread with minimal crust, use a Pullman loaf pan, which has a lid that closes off its high sides, preventing rise. You can transform a regular loaf pan into a makeshift Pullman loaf pan by placing a weighted down sheet pan on top.
13. 13. Measuring tools: Measuring spoons and cups are necessary for all cooking forms, but especially for baking, where precise measurements are required to make an edible product. Always aim for a level surface when measuring dry ingredients like flour, sugar, or spices. Liquid measuring cups allow for accurate pours of wet ingredients.
14. 14. Mixing bowls: Mixing bowls are an all-purpose tool that every baker needs. You can use mixing bowls to keep ingredients organized, proof dough, and mix multiple ingredients. You’ll need a few different sizes in either stainless steel or glass options. While a heavy, glass bowl might be ideal for staying in place while mixing a batter or dough, stainless steel bowls are lightweight and indestructible.
15. 15. Muffin pan: A must-have for muffins, cupcakes, yeasted pastries like morning buns, kugelhopf, or popovers, a muffin pan features 12–24 inset wells with angled walls. These pans are also available as silicone molds for even easier release.
16. 16. Offset spatula: These thin, angled, single-prong spatulas are great when applying frosting in an even swipe or loosening the edges of a particularly stubborn cake.
17. 17. Oven mitts: Oven mitts help you safely handle hot, fresh-from-the-oven loaves, cocottes, and baking trays. Some stores sell heat-proof gloves, which also work.
18. 18. Parchment paper: Parchment paper is treated to be heat-resistant and coated with a thin layer of nonstick material like silicone, making it easy to prevent sticking without adding extra oil to your baking pans or tray. For cookies and other flat-bottomed bakes like scones, silicone baking mats will also work.
19. 19. Pastry bags: Pastry bags are essential decorating tools for bakers. You can use plastic pastry bags with interchangeable nozzles for meticulous cake decorating, piping, and shaping fussy doughs and batters like macarons, choux pastry, or meringue.
20. 20. Pastry brush: Pastry brushes are useful for greasing a pan’s insides or brushing the outside of a loaf with water or egg wash to form a shiny crust.
21. 21. Pie dish: The wide fluted edges of a pie dish make for easy crimping of golden brown, buttery pie crust. Ceramic or glass pie plates heat slowly and evenly, perfect for the long baking times needed to create a delicious pie.
22. 22. Pie weights: In pie- and tart-making, the technique of blind baking involves baking the dough fully by itself (weighted to keep its shape) so that it can be served with unbaked fillings, like pastry cream and fruit. After shaping and crimping the pie dough into a tart pan or pie dish, you’ll line it with parchment paper, aluminum foil, or coffee filters, and then weigh it down with pie weights. These weights are heat-proof ceramic or metal beads that distribute light pressure across the raw dough without damaging it. After the bake, remove the weights before adding the final filling.
23. 23. Proofing baskets: Woven proofing baskets shape loaves of bread and allow air to circulate to form a thin, dry crust while they rest and rise, making the surface easier to score before baking.
24. 24. Rolling pin: A rolling pin is a classic cylindrical baking tool that can roll anything from shortcrust to puff pastry to pasta. Using a “French-style” rolling pin with tapered edges and no handles will result in even, smooth dough with no accidental dents as you move around the work surface.
25. 25. Sifter: Also known as a sieve, this cooking tool is a mesh strainer used to mix and aerate dry ingredients like baking powder, flour, and baking soda. Some recipes call for sifting flour to achieve a super-fine, delicate crumb, or garnish a bundt cake’s ridges with powdered sugar.
26. 26. Silpats: As a reusable alternative to parchment paper, silicone baking sheets, or “silpats,” are sustainable, nonstick mats that fit all baking sheets and don’t require greasing.
27. 27. Springform pan: You can use a springform pan to bake goods with open, set sides, like a cheesecake or shortcrust tart, but you can also use it for the easy-release of cakes. This handy pan has an interlocking base that fits into an expandable rim fitted with an outer latch. Once the dish has been baked and allowed to set, simply flip the latch and carefully lift the outer rim away.
28. 28. Stand mixer: Stand mixers are recommended for recipes that call for prolonged, gentle kneading, like brioche, or prolonged, speedy whipping, like a meringue or frosting.
29. 29. Whisk: A whisk is a lightweight tool featuring interlocking loops of wire or plastic held together at one end by a handle. Use handheld or whisk attachments on stand mixers to evenly mix dry and wet ingredients and incorporate air into a batter or dough by whipping.

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