Channeling your inner Star Baker? These sourdough gadgets are the thing you need

It's Bread Week! And, inspired by The Great British Bake Off and the cosiness of autumn finally creeping in, we're feeling seriously inspired here at Ideal Home to either revive or restart (myself included) our sourdough starters.

As seasoned product testers, we've tried pretty much every sourdough starter gadget out there – all of which are designed to take the unpredictability out of the process.

From keepers, like the SourHouse DoughBed, which stabilise the temperature of your starter in order to keep fermentation healthy to the best cookware worth its weight in gold, these are the gadgets our bread-loving team of writers swear by.

Baking sourdough at home may have been a flash in the pan for some during the pandemic but those who have stuck at it have been rewarded with a huge explosion of sourdough specific gadgets to help them in their process.

The biggest area of innovation has to be with tailor-made sourdough keepers – which are engineered to keep a starter at the optimal conditions for a better bake.

Sourdough yeast and lactobacilli (a crucial bacteria in the bread) thrive when kept in temperatures of around 24 to 26°C. If your kitchen is colder than that, the growth your starter needs will slow to crawl while a too-hot environment can cause it to over-ferment.

Brod & Taylor's sweetly named Sourdough Home has been helping our Content Editor Holly Cockburn keep her starter thriving.

'This sourdough home really takes the guess work out of keeping sourdough alive,' says Holly. 'I personally find the whole process of keeping a sourdough starter quite overwhelming, so being able to control the temperature is a game changer. I can also see it being really beneficial once winter rolls around and it becomes harder to keep our homes at the right temperature.'

With it's fridge-like design, it's a fairly sleek gadget that you can keep an eye on in your kitchen so that your starter is never neglected out of sight.

While Brod & Taylor's home is perfect for maintaining your starter, SourHouse's DoughBed is the thing you need if you struggle with the fermentation or dough proofing stage. Fitting large dough batches (up to 1.5kg), it uses a heated element to create the optimal temperatures for rising. Once it's ready, you can bake in the DoughBed too.

Helen's verdict on the keeper after using it was that it gave her the power to bake better bread. 'I now completely get how useful it is to have a consistent temperature during the ‘bulk prove’ phase,' Helen said after using it. 'If the temperature is always the same, it instantly removes one of the variables that can affect the rise.'

The result? 'I’m not exaggerating when I say that the cooked loaf was easily the best I’ve produced in months,' said Helen. 'The rise was good, the texture was much less dense than I’ve been getting recently and it had a great shape.'

To round things off, I have to give a mention to the most coveted cast iron casserole for baking sourdough: Le Creuset's specialist Bread Oven.

As well as having the ability to double as must-have decor in your kitchen, it has a design that lends itself to better bread. It's shape means that there's a tight internal volume, which leads to more steam than in a standard casserole dish getting trapped in. That makes for loaves that expand much better. Our reviewer Millie was pretty sold on its merits.

If Bread Week has also left you feeling inspired to try out a loaf this weekend, these are the sourdough gadgets we'd recommend for getting a head start!