Brod & Taylor Baking Shell, Batard

The Brod and Taylor Bread Proofer does more than just proof bread dough. Use it to make homemade yogurt or set it to a low temperature for pizza dough. You can also melt chocolate and butter without any fear of burning these delicate ingredients.

Baking Steel products were born through a unique combination of interests and skills. Andris Lagsdin, founder of Baking Steel, had an “ah-ha" moment while reading a review of Nathan Myhrvold’s book Modernist Cuisine: The Art & Science of Cooking. The article posed this problem, “you love Neapolitan style pizza, but you don’t want to invest in a brick oven.” According to The Modernist Cuisine, steel is a more conductive cooking surface than a brick oven’s stone, and because of its exceptional conductivity, steel offers faster and more even cooking at a lower temperature, resulting in beautiful, thin, crispy crust. Andris realized that he could use both his experience in cooking as well as his background in steel manufacturing to create a superior baking surface for cooks to use in their home ovens for pizzeria-quality pizza and artisan breads. Baking steels darken with use.

Baking steels store cold energy too. Make fun treats like ice cream and granita almost instantaneously using a steel that's cold from the freezer!

See the table below for measurements and weight of the rectangular baking steels.

For more details please see the specs tab, above.

Click here for round baking steels.

How is a baking steel better than a ceramic stone?

Steel's thermal conductivity is 18X greater than ceramic's conductivity! If you were to walk on ceramic bricks after they'd been sitting outside on a hot day, you wouldn't burn your feet, because the heat transfer between the ceramic and your feet would be rather slow. (Slow enough that it wouldn't hurt.) However, if you tried doing the same thing with steel, you'd probably end up with some severe burns, because the heat moves much faster from the surface of the steel to your foot. (Of course, don't try this at home!)

Why does my baking steel darken after use?

Your baking steel arrives ready to use. After its first use you'll begin to notice a change in the color of the baking surface. This is normal and with each use your baking steel will darken. Over time, the surface will become a uniform dark grey, almost black. Seasoning your steel will also result in a darker surface.

How are the Original, Modernist and Big baking steels different?

Baking fantastic pizza at home can be difficult because home ovens don't offer the kind of heat that the best Neapolitan and New York-style pizzas require. Super high heat helps gives pizza crust its light and crispy crust, characteristic hole structure and a good char. Enter the baking steel. With this 1/4" thick food-grade steel disk you can make restaurant-quality pizza right at home! Steel has an extremely high thermal conductivity which makes it an excellent surface for baking pizza on.

Normally, when you're making one pizza after another, you lose heat from opening and closing the oven door and this affects the temperature of your oven, which in turn affects your pizza. Baking steels are extremely dense so besides conducting heat well, they also absorb and retain their extreme heat. This means you won't have to deal with fluctuating oven temperatures when making pizzas for your family and friends!

Ice cream too! Baking steels store cold energy as well as hot, so you can make fun treats like ice cream and granita, almost instantaneously!

Baking stones are liable to shattering and cracks but baking steels are nearly indestructible. With its durable nature, baking steels really can last a lifetime.

For more details please see the specs tab, above.

Click here for rectangular baking steels, including the stylish Modernist Cuisine model.

Great bread begins with a great starter and when it comes to sourdough starter, temperature is everything! The complex mix of microbes that cause bread to rise (and give your bread a distinctive flavor and aroma) are extremely sensitive to their environment. The Sourdough Home provides an easy way to precisely control the behavior of your starter. With degree-by-degree control from 41-122°F (5-50°C) you can maintain a consistent temperature or vary it to control the growth rate, aroma, and flavor of your bread. You can switch the temperature display from Fahrenheit to Celsius.

The inside of the proofer measures 5-1/8" x 5.5" x 7.5" which allows a 1 quart jar or two smaller jars to fit inside. Two shelves are included for flexible storage of small items.

As acclaimed sourdough baker Maurizio Leo from the Perfect Loaf blog explains in the video above "It's important that a sourdough starter is maintained in a consistent way, but the challenge there is that the temperature in your kitchen, even from one side of the kitchen to the other, can vary quite drastically... one of the great things about the Sourdough Home is that it allows you to effortlessly dial in the temperature that you want to keep your sourdough starter at."

The Sourdough Home by Brod & Taylor offers a convenient, quiet, and compact way to maintain the temperature of your sourdough starter at the exact temperature you want to keep it at, whether that's a warm environment as you're preparing to bake with it, or a cool environment if you want to store it between bakes. The Sourdough Home both cools and heats, so you have total flexibility with how often you want to feed your starter, whether that's twice a day or once a week, or anywhere in between.

Sourdough starter is a living colony of yeast and good bacteria. Like any living thing it needs to eat—just flour and water. Feeding your starter the proper ingredients at the right time is the first step in creating great sourdough bread. Using the precise temperature control of the Sourdough Home, you can adjust starter feeding times to meet your schedule.

As starter ferments and grows, it creates CO₂ bubbles that cause the mixture to rise in its container. The ideal time to feed starter is when the rise has peaked—all of its food has been consumed—and before it begins to fall again. By using a constant seed ratio (quantity of flour and water) and controlling the temperature, you can control the feeding schedule to hours, days or even a week. Use the guidelines below to get started.

In a small town in Western Massachusetts, Brod & Taylor was founded on a passion for making wholesome food from scratch. Their products transform this often challenging process into a simple pleasure by blending innovative design with simplicity, affordability, and outstanding customer support.