The Spring Bake That Finally Got Me Organised

⏱ 4 min read

There is a particular kind of chaos that comes with baking sourdough when you are improvising your tools. I know it well. For a good couple of years, I was using a dinner knife to score my loaves, a random mixing bowl that was slightly too small, and a kitchen scale borrowed from my flatmate that may or may not have been accurate. The bread was decent. Sometimes it was good. But there was always this nagging feeling that I was making things harder than they needed to be.

Then spring came around last year, and something shifted.

I think it was the longer daylight hours that did it. Winter baking in London has this quality of feeling slightly desperate , you are trying to coax warmth out of a cold flat, your starter is sluggish, and everything takes longer than the recipe says it should. But around late February and into March, the kitchen temperature starts creeping up, the starter gets more lively, and there is this sense that baking is actually enjoyable again rather than a battle against the cold.

It was in that mood , optimistic, a bit of a Saturday, a playlist going in the background , that I decided to actually sort myself out properly.

The Turning Point

I had been gifted a copy of a baking book I had wanted for ages, and flicking through it I kept noticing how much of the technique relied on using the right kit. Not fancy stuff, not a professional setup. Just the correct tools used correctly. A proper banneton for the final proof so the dough holds its shape. A lame for scoring so you get a clean cut rather than dragging the dough. A bench scraper for actually handling sticky high-hydration dough without losing half of it to the worktop.

I had been winging it with substitutes for all of these. And honestly, it showed.

So I picked up the Bread Making Tool Kit from doughrise.store, mostly because it had everything in one place and I was tired of sourcing bits separately from random corners of the internet. What I did not expect was how much of a difference it would make to how relaxed the whole process felt.

What Actually Changed

The biggest shift was not any single tool , it was the fact that every stage of the bake now had the right thing for the job. When you are not fighting your equipment, you can actually pay attention to the dough. You notice when it is getting there during bulk fermentation. You can feel the tension building when you shape. The scoring becomes something you look forward to rather than dread.

A few things that genuinely surprised me once I had proper kit:

• A good bench scraper makes folding and shaping so much more controlled. If you have ever had a wet dough stick to everything and end up deflated by the time it hits the tin, a scraper is half the solution.
• Proofing in a properly floured banneton gives you a loaf that actually holds its shape in the oven. Before, I was using a bowl lined with a tea towel, which worked fine until it did not.
• Scoring with a proper lame feels completely different to using a knife. The blade is thin enough that it glides rather than drags, and you get that clean ear on the crust that makes a loaf look like you know what you are doing.

Spring Is Genuinely a Great Time to Start

If you have been thinking about getting more serious about sourdough, or you have had a few loaves that did not quite go to plan over winter, now is a good moment to reset. The conditions are more forgiving , ambient temperature is rising, fermentation is more predictable, and your starter is probably the happiest it has been in months.

It is also just a nice time to bake. There is something about a Saturday morning in March, bread proving on the counter, light actually coming through the window again, that makes the whole thing feel worthwhile in a way that a dark January bake sometimes does not quite manage.

The Bread Making Tool Kit is still what I reach for every time I bake. Not because I am precious about it, but because having the right tools just means I can focus on the actual baking rather than the workarounds. And that is when sourdough stops feeling like a project and starts feeling like something you actually enjoy doing.

Worth it, genuinely.

Happy baking! Find everything you need at doughrise.store

Photo by Shaya Kass on Unsplash