Utensil – Oblong Rattan Proofing Basket – Breadtopia

Comes with a cotton liner
At Breadtopia we have a little bit of a fetish for bread proofing baskets (also called brotforms and bannetons). So we’re constantly looking for the ultimate proofing basket and we have tried all of them. For a time our favorites had been the European-made, coiled rattan baskets that we’ve carried in our store. They are very good quality, but also a bit expensive.

We’ve looked at lower cost samples from Chinese suppliers, but the quality is noticeably inferior (both the rattan quality and the manufacturing quality) and we didn’t want to use them ourselves so that means we couldn’t sell them to you either.

The best rattan in the world comes from Indonesia. In fact, Indonesia is the world’s leading exporter of raw rattan and some of that raw Indonesian rattan is what the European proofing basket makers are using. But when an Indonesian rattan farmer is standing in his warehouse deciding which rattan to send to Slovakia and which to send next door to his brother’s basket making workshop, where do you think the best stuff goes?

And speaking of that basket making workshop next door, the culture of Indonesia is inextricably linked with handcrafts. Small craft shops are literally everywhere in Indonesia, and you could make a strong argument that the artisans of Indonesia (which is a huge percentage of the population) are the best in the world at making things with their hands.

All of which came together for us recently when we were very fortunate to connect with a small Indonesian handcraft company that specializes in rattan furniture and baskets who are now employing a group of native artisans to make all of our proofing baskets by hand from the incredible quality rattan supplied by local farmers.

By working directly with our Indonesian colleagues and cutting out virtually all of the middlemen usually involved in the process (including the expense and extra carbon footprint of shipping rattan to Europe only to then ship that same rattan in basket-form to the U.S.), we are able to bring these truly exceptional quality, hand-made proofing baskets to market at much better prices than similar, machine-made coiled rattan baskets from other parts of the world.