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Essential for loading the bread into the oven is a baker’s peel, a sort of paddle about an arm’s length longer than your oven is deep. Load and unload the loaves with a deft push-pull that comes quite naturally.

Knives

Every home baker needs a good knife. This is especially true if (like some authors) you can’t wait to slice the bread until it is completely cool: a bad knife can really wreck a fresh, soft loaf. Fortunately, although you can spend upwards of twenty dollars for an elegant knife, a truly splendid bread cutter lurks on the supermarket rack for about two dollars. (They call it a ham slicer, but don’t let them fool you.) These knives have a long, thin blade with the wavy kind of serrated edge—not the sawtooth sort, which is inferior. They keep their sharpness for a year or two of daily slicing—not forever, granted, but in the meantime they are great. They’re very hard to sharpen at home. Electric knives, if you have one, work very nicely.

A short-bladed knife is for the birds, by the way. One of our favorite catalogs advertises a “bread” knife that has a 7-inch blade—ridiculous!

On the other hand, for loaves of the dense, firm sort, that want to be sliced thin, a long, razor-sharp French vegetable knife serves better than the one described above. If you like really thin slices, favor the firm breads, and have a rich uncle, there is a hand-turned Dutch all-purpose slicer that is truly remarkable. The brand name is eva, and it effortlessly cuts slices of any thinness out of the densest bread. There are probably other such gizmos, too, that we haven’t seen.

To slice a loaf, cut with a smooth, gentle, sawing motion—lots of sawing and not much downward pressure. If you can, grasp the loaf on both sides with your noncutting hand. The secret of perfect, even slices is fierce concentration, even more than manual dexterity.

The Bread Box

You’ve just put a lot of work and a lot of good stuff into making this great bread. How to store it so it keeps its appeal to the very last slice?

First, always let bread cool completely (under a towel, to soften the crust and minimize big holes) before you put it away. Bread will sweat if you put it away warm, and be likely to mold.

If the bread will be eaten in a day or two—or, if it is a good keeper, four or five—store it at cool room temperature, loosely wrapped in a clean cloth or a clean paper bag, or in an old-fashioned bread box. Avoid plastic bags or airtight containers: without air circulation, at room temperature bread can mold quickly. If you use a bread box of any kind, clean it well between loaves to prevent any mold spores from passing from one batch to another. Something simple and at hand may be just right: for example, “granite-ware” canning pots with their loose lids make excellent bread boxes—mouseproof and easy to clean.

For longer storage, freezing is best. For easy-to-use, elegant frozen slices, cool the bread thoroughly before you pick up the knife. Slice carefully. Arrange the slices in order in the pan they were baked in. Wrap airtight, and freeze. Once the bread is frozen solid, you can remove the pan. Now, easily separated slices can go from freezer to toaster; if you make a sandwich in the morning, it will be thawed and ready to eat by lunchtime.

Don’t keep bread in the refrigerator because there, it stales fastest of all.

Bread Machines

A fresh hot loaf baking to perfection—it fills the house with that wonderful smell, and makes us so happy to be home! With all the demands on our time, it’s rare to have the luxury of making bread from beginning to end by hand these days. But bread machines can give us the warmth and goodness of homemade bread without our being there to knead, to punch at just the right time, shape at just the right time, to preheat the oven—it really is a miracle.

Frankly, it can be a second miracle to have excellent machine loaves using entirely whole wheat flour. Even though some offer whole wheat cycles, bread machines are, in fact, engineered to use white flour. Coaxing them to do their best