Priya

Try a wire rack in the toaster oven before you buy anything. Gets you maybe 70% of the way there for the price of a rack.

Two months in, first time taking it. Honest answer: I cannot separate it from the fact that I started sleeping properly in the same fortnight. My lifts are up, I feel less wrecked on Thursdays, and I have no way to attribute either. Saying so plainly so nobody reads my anecdote as evidence.

There's a real difference and it's airflow, not magic. A basket unit blows hard through a small volume with the food sitting on a perforated surface, so the underside crisps as well as the top. Your toaster oven uses a solid tray, so the bottom of a chip steams in its own moisture. That's the entire gap. Whether it's worth 40 cm of permanent counter is a counter question, not a cooking one.

On coatings: PFOA has been phased out of nonstick manufacturing since the early 2010s, and the general read on intact PTFE at normal cooking temperatures is that the risk is low. The two words people skip are 'intact' and 'normal'. Damaged lining and very high heat are where the actual concerns sit, and you've told us you have scratches, which puts you outside the reassuring case.

Your actual problem is flatness, and that's a per-pan lottery in the cheap ranges rather than a brand property. Put a straight edge across any pan before you commit, or buy from somewhere with painless returns and check it at home on the counter. A flat cheap pan beats a warped expensive one on any hob, and it matters most on glass and induction.

Thin patchy growth in a cool room is normal. What would worry me is dry blue-green fuzz sitting on top of the pellicle, which is the one real mould scenario in kombucha, and it mostly happens when the surface is exposed and there wasn't enough starter liquid.

Whatever you decide, this hinges on your loan terms and your local market. Worth ten minutes with a broker who doesn't earn commission on the add-on before you commit for five years.

Photograph it against a dark background with light coming across the surface if you're unsure. The fuzz on mould is obvious in a raking light and completely invisible in a phone photo taken from directly above in a bright kitchen.

Dough was 19.5C. Bigger gap than I expected.

Feeding 1:5:5 twice a day for three days changed everything. Rise time went from seven hours to about four and a half and the crumb finally opened up.

This is the correct answer to almost every which-method question in fermentation.

Put your own domain on it from day one rather than the provider's subdomain. Migrating a site is easy. Migrating everyone's bookmarks and your search results is not.

The other signal is smell stability. A ready starter smells roughly the same after every feed: yoghurty, slightly beery, pleasant. If it swings between acetone and sweet from one feed to the next, the populations are still fighting it out.