When you start baking bread, you open up a world of possibilities. People who bake bread often become obsessed, finding the best recipes and making small tweaks to create unique loaves to eat and gift to friends.
Every part of the bread-making process matters. Everything from the yeast you use to how your oven heats will affect how things taste and look once they come out of the oven.
Choosing the right bread pans is essential to successful bread making. The right pan gives your bread shape and makes it easier to predict how things will turn out based on baking time, size, and even the weather outside.
When you first start making bread, it’s sometimes overwhelming to think of all the supplies you need. However, once you start making your way out of the beginner stages of making white loaves and other simple recipes, you’ll need to buy different bread pans to accommodate shapes and styles.
To get you started, we’ve put together a list of seven types of bread pans to help you choose which ones to pick first!
Table of Contents
Loaf Pans
These are starter bread pans that most people have at home. You can make a ton of different things with them, including banana bread, brownies, cornbread, cobbler, etc.
Loaf pans are versatile, so you can easily make things that do not have bread in them. They’re also a great starting point for people who finally want to try making bread from scratch.
These loaf pans do very well for making white loaves, wheat bread, raisin bread, and other types of bread you’ll enjoy eating. They’re usually deep enough to let the dough rise quite high, and they provide an even bake on all sides to avoid wet insides when you take the bread out of the oven.
You can find loaf pans in various sizes, but they usually come in nine-inch lengths. Find them in a store or online in aluminum, glass, metal, or plastic.
Cake Pans
Cake pans are perfect for baking round or rectangle cakes, but they’re also terrific for when you want to make things like dinner rolls. You can find cake tins in all sizes made of various materials, but the height of the wall will dictate how sturdy and tall your rolls will be.
In a cake tin, you can group your rolls or biscuits closely together, so they can only rise and bake, giving you tall, beautiful rolls you can bring to your next dinner party.
Square Bread Pans with Lids
Some people want to make the perfect square loaf. In many countries outside the United States, you’ll find square loaves of white and wheat bread in higher-end bakeries. People use them for sandwiches or toast for breakfast in the mornings.
You can buy a square bread pan with a sliding lid that comes off when putting dough inside or taking the bread out once it’s done. The square shape prevents the bread from growing too large outside of the pan like they do in loaf pans.
Baguette Bread Pans
The baguette is one of the quintessential shapes of bread. But don’t let it fool you; the baguette can be tricky, so you’ll need special baking molds designed to make the perfect rounded baguette.
Increase your chances of baking success with a nonstick French bread baking mold. These look like pans styled into waves, with each section providing just enough room to grow the perfect baguette.
Start making baguettes for sandwiches or to give away as a thank-you gift whenever you’re invited over to someone’s house for dinner. Giving away bread is a great idea; people will never forget when you offer freshly baked bread instead of flowers or a bottle of wine.
Perforated Loaf Tins
Are you looking for ways to eliminate soggy bottoms in your loaves? You can buy some perforated loaf tins in aluminum or carbon steel to give your bread a more even cooking in the oven.
These pans almost look like a metal strainer. The holes are on the bottom and the sites, so the heat from the oven penetrates from all sides evenly. Use them to bake any number of traditional loaves, and you can find them in different shapes to get the results you’re looking for.
Roast Bread Pans
You’ll need something a bit bigger and shallower if you ever want to try baking focaccia bread. A roasting pan with short walls is ideal because you can spread olive oil on the surface and get a lovely, consistent bake across the entire loaf.
Buy one with handles that make it easier to pull out of the oven when things get hot. Once you have the pan, you can try to bake things like biscuits, croissants, and other pastries on them.
Steamers
Terraced steamers come in handy whenever you want to make mantou and other Asian bread treats. The steamed bread has an incredible fluffiness to it, and steam is usually a lot easier to gauge compared to working with an oven.
You can find some fantastic steamer pots on Amazon that come with instructions on how to make mantou, and they often come with some basic supplies to get you through your first few times making the bread.
Once you make plain mantou, you can branch into making mantou with green onions or do something sweet with chocolate or raisins.
Final Thoughts
These types of pans will get you started on your bread-making journey. The most important thing is buying a size that you like working with. Think about how big you want your bread loaves to be and make your purchase decisions based on that.
The material, color, etc., are all secondary to how big you want your loaves. After you settle on a size, you can start buying bread pans with cool designs or patterns to shape the bottoms of your bread.