Must-have bakeware for the kitchen

10 Rolling pins If you have a single rolling pin in your kitchen, make it a large wooden pin. I use the traditional French type of pin, which is a large cylinder with no handles. If you feel comfortable with them, rolling pins with handles work well, too. Avoid the Italian pins, which taper at the ends.

11 Rubber spatulas These are indispensable for folding mixtures, cleaning out bowls and pans, and transferring small amounts of mixtures. While traditionally made of rubber, flexible spatulas nowadays are made of silicone, which lasts longer and won’t burn.

12 Stand mixer Perhaps the most useful item in the baker’s kitchen, a stand mixer is great for making pastries, combining all manner of mixtures, beating egg whites, and kneading bread dough. Some stand mixers will even accommodate a copper bowl insert, which is handy for beating egg whites. Most stand mixers come with three attachments: a dough hook, a paddle blade, and a whisk. Each of these is designed with a different stiffness in mind for whatever’s being combined.

If you plan on making a lot of bread, you may want to buy a heavy-duty, professional grade stand mixer; otherwise a stand mixer designed for the home kitchen is sufficient.

Image courtesy of Williams-Sonoma.

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Excerpted from Baking by James Peterson Copyright © 2009 by James Peterson. Excerpted by permission of Ten Speed Press, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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