Our Sourdough Baking Gift Guide - for Sourdough Bakers You Love (updated 2025)

We all probably have the tools we need to start baking sourdough bread around our kitchen. A bowl, measuring cups or a scale, a towel, a knife/razor blade and something to bake your bread on, like a cookie sheet/roaster/dutch oven/bread pan. Additionally, we all need a container to keep our starter.

While baking perfectly tasty sourdough bread doesn’t require many tools, if a baker you love is hooked on sourdough, there are definitely some tools that will improve their bread and make their baking-life easier.

Here is a list of perfect gifts, taken from the buying guide in our Sourhouse Community Cookbook and updated for the sourdough baker in your life this holiday season.

The Basics

• Kitchen Scale: A digital kitchen scale is essential to measure the ingredients accurately by weight. It's important to get a good quality scale that can measure in grams or ounces. If you don’t have one, this is the first thing to buy. 
• Dough Scraper: This tool is helpful for scraping the dough off the bowl and surface when kneading and shaping the dough. You can get a plastic scraper for a few dollars. 
• Parchment Paper: Parchment paper is used to transfer the shaped dough to the baking sheet without sticking. You can buy a roll of parchment paper for a few dollars. In the meantime, you can dust your baking sheet with cornmeal or flour.
  

The Big Upgrades

When you hit a plateau and are ready to upgrade your kit further, the next purchase would be either a thermometer, dutch oven/roaster or a Goldie. 

• Probe Thermometer: Understanding temperature is key to making great loaves consistently. You can use a probe thermometer to help judge when your bread is finished baking, to understand the temperature of your room, starter and dough.
• Dutch Oven, Clay Baker or Enamel Roaster: A Dutch oven, or roaster is used to bake your bread and to create a humid environment during the first stages of baking. This will give you more oven spring. 
• Goldie by Sourhouse: When you are ready to keep your starter on a schedule and to keep it most active, the award-winning Goldie provides a warm, safe home for your starter.
• DoughBed by Sourhouse: Put bread baking on a schedule with DoughBed by Sourhouse™: A warm, easy-to-store tool for home bakers who want to confidently proof bread dough just right, every time, on time.

The “Nice-to-Haves”

• Starter Jar: Any jar will hold a starter, but some are better than others. Using a jar designed for sourdough starter will make feeding, rise tracking and clean-up easier. 
• Bread Blanket by Sourhouse: Eventually you will want to share your bread and something like our Bread Blankets will make your bread ready for transporting and gifting.  
• Banneton or Proofing Basket: A banneton or proofing basket is used to hold the dough as it proofs and helps shape the dough into a round or oblong shape. You can use a colander or a bowl lined with a floured towel as a makeshift proofing basket. 
• Razor Blades (and maybe a lame for holding a blade): is the easiest way to score your bread. A sharp knife will work in the meantime. 
• Robust Oven Mitts: Once you start handling 500ºF dutch oven lids regularly you might want something more robust than the typical pot holder.
• Grain Mill: Milling your own grains unlocks a world of flavor possibilities and new challenges.
• Locally milled flour and whole grains: Unlock a word of new flavors and nutrition.

Cookbooks

• Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson: the seminal sourdough cookbook that popularized the open crumb "country loaf.
• The Art of Gluten-Free Bread by Aran Goyoaga: an authoritative gluten-free bread reference for sourdough bakers (including pastry too).
• Sourdough: Recipes for Rustic Fermented Breads, Sweets, Savories, and More by Sarah Owens: an inspiring book about incorporating flavors of the garden in your bread. A must from lovers of inclusions.
• Hungry Ghost Bread Book: An Offbeat Bakery's Guide to Crafting Sourdough Loaves, Flatbreads, Crackers, Scones, and More by Jonathan Stevens: The mind of one of the best bakers in the United States. It reminds us that sourdough bread is bread. 
• The Beginner’s Guide to Sourdough: Best-Kept Secrets for Successful Bread Every Time by Amy Coyne: An approachable and thoughtful sourdough baking book for beginner and intermediate bakers.
• A Slow Rise: Favorite Recipes from Four Decades of Baking with Heart by Daniel Leader: A peak into the history of sourdough bread as it evolved in the northeastern US from a sourdough pioneer.
• Southern Ground: Reclaiming Flavor Through Stone-Milled Flour by Jennifer Lapidus: All about baking with local, fresh milled flour from a milling pioneers and baker.

Check out our podcast Bake This Book for more sourdough cookbook ideas.