- Julie Scelfo for Epicurious
"The Ultimate Baker’s Kitchen"
Love to bake? Design your kitchen to suit your passion with tips, equipment, and layout advice from designers and industry experts
Anyone who’s ever baked five dozen cupcakes for their child’s school, Christmas cookies for a crowd, or (heaven help us) a wedding cake knows that in many ways, the average home kitchen isn’t designed for a big-batch, nearly professional baker. We turned to experts for their suggestions about the ultimate kitchen layout, tools, and equipment for committed bakers.
When Alex Hitz, baking enthusiast and founder of the Beverly Hills Kitchen, a line of frozen Southern meals sold on HSN, opted to step back from the restaurant business and reinvent his career some years ago, the change also inspired a vision of another sort of makeover: the ideal baker’s kitchen. Over time, Hitz developed a template that other avid bakers can follow to create their own.
“Having had a restaurant kitchen, I knew what a dream home kitchen would be,” says Hitz, whose favorite things to bake include biscuits, yeast rolls, and “a lot of Southern desserts, like caramel cakes and coconut cake and hummingbird cake, which I love.” Today Hitz, whose first cookbook, My Beverly Hills Kitchen: Classic Southern Cooking with a French Twist, is scheduled to be published by Knopf this fall, has realized his dream and enjoys a space that functions pretty much like a commercial kitchen—but is too attractive to be mistaken for one.