Making about one 1kg batch a month for family and friends, no plans to sell. Deciding between a silicone loaf mould at around £18 and building a wooden box mould with freezer paper liners for roughly the same in materials. Storage space is limited and I don't have great woodworking tools. Which do people who make small amounts actually prefer after a year?
Whatever you buy, get one sized so a 1kg oil batch fills it to about three quarters. An underfilled mould gives you short squat bars and an overfilled one overflows during gel. Most 'fits 1kg' listings mean total batch weight including lye and water, not oil weight, so check.
Silicone for your volume, easily. One batch a month means the wooden mould's advantages — cheaper at scale, better insulation, more sizes — barely come into play, while its disadvantage of relining every batch shows up every single time.
The one real caveat: silicone insulates poorly, so the sides of the loaf cool fast and you get partial gel, which shows as a lighter ring around a darker centre. Fix is to sit the silicone mould inside a cardboard box with a towel over it for the first 12 hours. That's the whole trick and it costs nothing.
It is. Either insulate fully and get a complete gel, or deliberately refrigerate and get no gel at all. The ugly outcome is the in-between.
The partial gel ring is exactly what I got in a test batch in a plastic tub. Good to know it's an insulation thing rather than a recipe thing.
Freezer paper lining is genuinely fiddly and it never sits perfectly flat, so you get creases in the sides of every bar. People who love wooden moulds have usually made a proper collapsible one and use silicone liners in it, which is a bigger project than you're describing.
Storage argument goes to silicone too — it rolls up or nests. A wooden box takes the same shelf space empty as full.
@conditioner_lab · last yr. · 2 replies
Buy the silicone one with a wooden or acrylic sleeve if you can find it slightly over your budget. A bare silicone loaf bulges at the sides when you pour and your bars end up with curved faces that don't stack. The sleeve is the difference between a nice loaf and a slightly wonky one.
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@levain_lorna · last yr.
Or just sit the bare mould inside a slightly larger cardboard box, which does the same job for free. Mine has lived in the same wine box for three years.
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