Artful Cookware for the Culinary Artiste

As a chef, Carolyn Johnson has a particular appreciation for anything crafted with as much painstaking care as the dishes on her 80 Thoreau menu. So it’s only appropriate that, this holiday season, she’s pointing shoppers towards Cambridge ceramicist Judy Motzkin and her elegant stoneware bowls, designed for baking no-knead breads.

Hand-made on the potter’s wheel, the unique lidded pots are the result of their own painstaking process of trial and error. Motzkin crowd-sourced the testing (detailed here) to come up with the perfect design for achieving that crispy crust and airy interior without melting the plastic handle off your Dutch oven (speaking of trial and error). She’s continued to fine tune, adding features like integrated handles that are safe to touch even when it’s fresh out of the oven, and customizable options like recipes, bread-related quotes or decorations painted right on the pot.

Johnson, thanks to longtime boyfriend and fellow chef Bill Flumerfelt, already has one of these at home. She tells us they’ve had tons of fun experimenting with different recipes and that they’re perfect for both beginners and more seasoned bakers – and they’re beautiful little works of art, too (much like each of the dishes on Johnson’s menu).