How to clean a banneton

The golden rule: no soap, no soak, no dishwasher

Everything else in this guide follows from one rule: a rattan or cane banneton should never be washed with soap, soaked in water, or run through the dishwasher. Cane is wood, and wood behaves badly when it is repeatedly saturated. Soaking waterlogs the fibers, which swells and can loosen the tight weave that holds the basket's shape, and it leaves the cane damp deep inside where it dries slowly — the perfect conditions for mold. Soap is worse still, because the porous cane absorbs it and then slowly releases it into the next dough, leaving a faint off taste. A dishwasher combines the two worst things, prolonged hot water and detergent, and will ruin a basket in a single cycle. So the mental model to hold onto is that a banneton is cleaned dry, not wet. Once you accept that, the routine is simple and quick.

Everyday cleaning: knock out the dry flour

For the vast majority of bakes, cleaning is nothing more than removing the loose flour and crumbs the loaf left behind. The trick is to wait until everything is bone dry. Right after you turn a loaf out, the basket holds a little residual moisture and any stray dough is still tacky — fussing with it now just smears it into the weave. Instead, set the basket aside and let it dry for a few hours (see the drying section below). Once it is fully dry, turn it upside down and give it a firm tap or two against the edge of the sink or the counter to dislodge the bulk of the loose flour. Then take a stiff, dry brush— a dedicated pastry brush with firm bristles, a clean vegetable brush, or even a soft-bristled dish brush kept dry for this purpose — and sweep it briskly across the weave to lift out the flour caught in the grooves. Dry flour flicks away in seconds; the same flour, if it had been damp, would have smeared into a paste. That is the whole everyday clean: tap, brush, done.

Dealing with stuck dough

Sometimes a loaf leaves a patch of dough welded to the cane — usually a sign the basket needed more flour or more seasoning, or that the dough was especially wet. The wrong response is to attack it wet with water and a scrubber. The right one is patience: let the stuck dough dry completely and harden, and it will brush or flake off far more cleanly than it ever would while soft. A hardened crumb of dough pops loose with a fingernail or a firm brush; a soft one just smears deeper into the weave. If a stubborn bit resists even after drying, a little light, dry scrapingis fine — the dull edge of a butter knife, a wooden skewer, or a plastic bench scraper worked gently along the grooves will lift it without gouging the cane. The goal is to coax it out, not to scour; you are not trying to get the basket spotless, only to keep dough from building up bake after bake. A thin, even film of dried flour in the weave is not dirt to be removed — it is the seasoning that makes your loaves release, so leave it alone.

Occasional deeper cleaning — and the rare rinse

Over many bakes a basket can accumulate more caked flour and dough than a brush alone shifts, or it might pick up an oily residue from an enriched dough. When that happens, the first move is still dry: a more thorough going-over with a stiff brush, working the bristles hard into every groove, followed by a good tapping-out. Only if a basket becomes genuinely soiled — not just dusty, but grimy or smelling off — should you consider a quick rinse under running water, with no soap and absolutely no soaking. If you do rinse, keep it brief, and then treat drying as the entire job: the basket must be dried slowly and completely afterward before it goes anywhere near storage or another loaf. Because a rinse resets the seasoning, you will usually need to re-flour more heavily for the next few bakes to rebuild the non-stick layer, much as you did when the basket was new. Treat a rinse as a rare reset, not part of the routine.

Air-drying fully to prevent mold

Mold is the single most common way a banneton dies, and it is entirely preventable with one habit: dry the basket out completely after every use. Even without a rinse, a basket absorbs a little humidity from the dough each time, and that moisture, combined with the flour in the weave, is exactly what mold feeds on. After you have brushed it out, leave the basket somewhere with real air circulation — on a rack, propped on its side, or upside down — for several hours or overnight, until it feels bone dry through and through. If your kitchen is humid or the basket got damp, you can speed things up in a barely warm oven: put it in an oven that has been heated and then turned off, using only the residual heat, and never leave it in a hot oven that is still on. The key point is that a banneton must be fully dry before it is put away. Never store it damp, and never seal a moist basket in a bag, a drawer or a closed cupboard, where trapped humidity has nowhere to escape. Do this consistently and a cheap basket lasts for years; skip it and mold can appear in a couple of weeks.

What to do if mold appears

If you open the cupboard and find fuzzy spots, discoloration or a musty smell on a rattan basket, be honest about the outcome: because the cane is porous and mold roots into the fibers where you cannot fully clean or sanitize it, the safest course with a natural-cane banneton is to discard it and replace itrather than risk it touching food again. It is not worth trying to salvage a moldy wooden basket with bleach or heavy scrubbing, both of which fail on porous wood and leave their own residues. A replacement banneton is inexpensive, and prevention costs nothing — so the real takeaway is to build the drying habit that keeps mold from starting. Our sourdough proofing basket review covers choosing a replacement and what to look for in a well-made basket if you do need to buy again.

Long-term storage

Where and how you store a banneton between bakes matters as much as the cleaning itself. Store it only when it is fully dry, and store it somewhere with air circulation — an open shelf, a wire rack, or a cupboard that is not sealed tight — rather than trapped in a plastic bag or a zipped container where any lingering moisture cannot get out. If you bake infrequently and a basket will sit unused for a long stretch, that airflow matters even more, because a basket that started out slightly damp has weeks to grow mold in a closed space. Avoid storing bannetons in a damp basement or a cabinet next to the dishwasher or sink where humidity runs high. Keep them dry, keep them airy, and they will be ready whenever you are. When you pull one out after a long break, give it a quick brush and check for any musty smell before you flour it for a loaf.

Cloth-lined baskets: a different routine

Not every proofing basket is bare cane. Some come with a linen or cotton liner, and you can add a cloth liner to any basket, which changes the cleaning routine. The clothgets the same dry-first treatment day to day — let it dry, then shake and brush out the flour rather than washing it after every bake, since frequent washing strips the built-up flour that helps the dough release. But unlike bare cane, a cloth liner canbe machine- or hand-washed occasionally when it becomes genuinely grubby or starts to smell, and it must then be dried thoroughly before it goes back in the basket. The basket underneath a liner still needs the same dry care as any rattan basket. Many bakers keep both options in rotation: the bare seasoned basket for the classic spiral-ringed crust, and a liner for very wet, high-hydration doughs that tend to stick. If you use a liner, remember that the basket beneath it can still trap moisture, so dry the whole thing — liner and basket — fully before storage.

The care routine in three habits

Cleaning a banneton comes down to three habits you can hold in your head: keep it dry, brush out the flour rather than washing it, and never soak or soap it. Follow those and a rattan basket becomes more useful with age, developing into a reliable, near-non-stick fixture of your baking. The care chain runs straight into the rest of hearth-loaf baking — once the basket has done its job, the scoring guide covers the cut that comes next, and the sourdough tools overview places the basket alongside the lame, scraper and thermometer that round out the kit. Look after the basket and it will outlast far more expensive gear in the drawer.