Why do you slash bread

Top tip : Somewhere on your design there must be a slash, so the bread breaks open as it bakes. The best bread-makers on test How to make Italian bread The best bread knives Six steps to brilliant bread How to solve 10 common bread problems. Subscriber club Reader offers More Good Food. Sign in.

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Back to Recipes Smoothies Autumn drinks See more. Once you notice your blade starting to get blunt or pull on the dough, you should sharpen or replace it for the next time you score. You want to make sure that you avoid sticking as much as possible when it comes to scoring bread. For this reason, it can be useful to add a little something to help prevent the blade from sticking to the dough.

The easiest thing you can do is coat your blade in cooking spray and quickly score the dough. Cooking spray is easy to apply and does a great job. One thing that has a big effect on how well you score your dough is how confident you are with it.

Instead of pushing into the dough, try allowing the blade to do the work and you should notice that the scoring is easier. One difference by me. When ever I use the standard amount of water when doing the Sourdough Bread, the mixture is always very soggy and sticks to you like limpets. When I use the normal bread water content i. So I reduced the water content by g on this recipe. Very satisfied with the result. Many thanks! Hi Daniel, It is always best to try a recipe as stated and after that see what needs to be altered to make it your own.

There will always be adjustments, even with your own versions, you will see you sometimes need to change the hydration just a bit with the seasons or with a new sack or brand of flour for instance. And as long as you are satisfied with your own bread, that is the most important thing of course.

I am looking to do those white straight lines presumably made from some sort of flour duster. Thank you. You can see how this works here: www. I love bread and always found scoring to be very pretty looking. I had no idea it actually served a purpose until I read your article. Thanks for the great information. If so, any tips on how to avoid this when using the lame? Degassing is perfectly normal a certain amount and you should not worry about it, provided you use the right bread flour and your dough has the capacity to spring back in the oven.

You can also see this in our short video here this is from quite a few years back, but the time lapse oven spring is still fun to watch : www. Also check out our oven and stone oven tips: www. Hi Joy, Scoring is done after the final proofing just before you take the bread to the oven. However the Wrights Flour just seems so strong and it just keeps expanding and expanding no matter what. A Fan oven is useless. I could never get anything good out of it, it also grows the Bread to one side which is annoying.

If you do it early and then let it rise, it works so much better. If you do it just before, your bread just dries out and it shrinks instead of rises. If you put the bread in the oven without letting it rise, you just end up with a flat bread. Those Tins with lids on work amazingly for Fan Ovens, they keep the moisture in, but you will end up with a rectangle store like bread.

You try it yourself and the results are so different…. Thank you for your insights Grant. Hope our scoring tips are useful to you in creating the right weak spot in your loaf so it tears where you want it. No grant you need to do some more R and D. For those of you reading this do not loose heart. The only ingredients you need are flour, water, salt and yeast or a natural levean.

No oil, milk or butter and nothing added to the flour. What is most important is developing good dough strength and elasticity, and properly fermenting your dough. Of it is over proofed it will be a mess. You can definitely make great free for artisan bread in a home fan oven.

Using a combo cooker or Dutch oven is the best but a good thick baking stone and a tray full of lava rocks and water will work great too. If using a baking stone turn fan off if possible. Not before the final rise. The persons skill is what makes good bread even more than the ingredients and equipment. Preshaping and shaping should be done with a confident but gentle hand. Practice practice practice. Hello Ann, Thank you.

We do ship these lames all over the world also to Malaysia, at lowest possible shipping costs. You can check them out here: www. I had the same problem when I started baking and found that the problem came from overproofing. The bread had simply been proofing to long and I had to go back and read, read and read. Find the right temperature for proofing, autolyse time and make sure I was not letting it sit to long, if I had to let it rest just got really overworked during the kneading process.

Stretch and fold and time in between for wet dough and so much more. I never imagined the amount of things I had to take into account. Anyway, once I did, I never had another collapse at scoring. Good luck. Hi Lauren, Thank you very much for your helpful addition to this posting. You are right, it is a complex of things to take into account and lots of skills to make your own when learning to bake, but it is always worth it we think! But when baking the bread, it often tears at one side.

What can I do about this? Can this be because of my small oven and using hot-air, so that the top of the bread is baked to quick? Hi Alexander, Heat air is certainly not ideal when wanting to create big ears.

You need to create lots of steam to try and keep the crust form drying out in the first minutes of the baking process, this is the only way the bread can expand.

And it is not really possible to leave out a starter and still have a good working recipe, the balance would not be right, so you should change to recipes without starters and use them. If you forgot, we would suggest to just bake the next day. When should I do scoring? I have used a steamy oven as well as oiled loaf top. Should I score seconds before putting the loaf in, or score and wait, say, 20 minutes?

The slats look so nice, and I want my loaves to be taller! Hi Jeanne, You should score indeed immediately before the bread goes into the oven. Do not wait.