How do you get nice flat even slashes going in the direction you want? I've tried a bread knife, a razor blade, a lame and finally a pair of scissors. Here is a photo (I hope!) of my last attempt. Any help much appreciated.

Happy New Year to all at TFL. I've learnt a lot and improved a lot. Still a long way to go and I am not satisfied. My last loaf of the year was a white loaf with added spelt flower. My slashing resulted in a slashed finger - but I live to tell the tale. This time next year - just see what I will have learnt!

I tend to economize on razor blades for slashing, using them quite a few times before throwing them away. I think I've been handicapping myself. I used a new blade for the last batch of ciabatta, and got aggressive with the slashing -- 1/4 inch deep, at a 45-degree angle to the surface of the boule. Result: great oven spring. My slashes expanded a whole inch, rather than the usual anemic 1/4 inch or so.

Hi

I'm having reall problems with homemade baguettes, I am slashing the top but the bread always splits on the side near the bottom and the slashes never open up properly. I have a proper bakers Lame, and I use this technique

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QdzHuhJ-ls

But no matter what I do, different oven temp, wetter or drier dough, the slashes on the top never open properly and the split is on the side near the base.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Sam

Hi everyone,

I have been reading posts on the forum for many months now and trying to gain wisdom on the topic of baguette scoring.  I have read almost every post on the subject but can't seem to get it right.  Out of about a dozen attempts at baguettes, I have successfully generated a nice ear/grigne one time.  Strangely enough, it was on the 3rd attempt.  Here is a picture:

I have been using Hamelman's Poolish Baguette and Hamelman's Straightdough Baguette for all attempts.  I have been using King Arthur flour and I usually do a 30-60 min autolyze and an extra fold to get sufficient gluten development.  I check the proofing with a "poke test" as most people do.  When the dimple very slowly returns after a poke, I consider it ready to bake.  I slash with a curved lame with a depth of ~ 1/4 in (or what I perceive to be a 1/4 in. It's difficult to say exactly).  I hold the blade at an angle (I think ~30-45 deg) to try to cut a flap of dough.  I cook the baguettes in a 460 degree oven (preheated for 45 min) on 1/2 in unglazed tiles.  For steam, I follow Hamelman's instructions: throw a few ice cubes into a cast iron skillet on the bottom shelf while slashing, slide the baguettes onto the stone, and then pour 1 cup of boiling water into the skillet.  I have followed this method for all attempts.

I think my shaping has improved in the past 4 months and I've tried to vary my slashing technique slightly to see what I'm doing wrong.  Now, I would like to request some advice.  I appreciate any guidance that anyone will offer.  Here are the pictures of my "ear-free" baguettes.  Individual photos can be seen at http://photobucket.com/atlbreadpics.  Thanks in advance.

On a positive note, I have eaten many many delicious sandwiches from all of this.  Thanks for your help!

Kyle

I did a little experiment with my daily bread.  I usually bake 3 or 4 loaves, with 3 in loaf pans and one free-form.  I have always scored them the same way:  the free-form gets on long central score, the pan loaves get two parallel vertical scores.  But this time I wanted to see how identical loaves in the same oven would react to different scores.  Latitudinal, longitudinal, diagonal, and the long low-angle cut.  The results are clear:

The best bloom came from the free-form and pan loaves that got a single long cut with the blade held almost horizontal, lifting the dough up rather than cutting a slice in it.  All these were baked in an oven with no steam.  The depth of the cuts was uniform but the results quite different.  I think the dough was slightly underproofed, looking at the massize bloom of the free-form loaf, but I did learn that the simplest cut with the right technique lets the bread keep blooming instead of sealing up as the others did.

Happy baking!

-Peter

Over the past few weeks I have been trying to "take it up a level."   I had hit the wall on getting properly shaped and slashed naturally leavened loaves.    LindyD's recent post http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/21045/fire-and-ice-great-oven-steam on generating steam set off a lightbulb in my head.  The symptoms I have been trying to cure are cuts that open a little and then seal over, and a split side.   I had been convinced that this was caused by underproofing even though I was doing my best with the poke test, rise times and so on.   When I read her post I started to wonder if I was having trouble with steam.   I had been preheating a dry jelly roll pan on the base of the oven and pouring in cold water at the same time as loading the loaves.  This sets off a cloud of steam and then the water continues to boil for around 15 minutes before it evaporates completely so I thought I was all set.   But I do have a brand new gas oven and after reading Lindy's post, I began to suspect that it was efficiently venting out steam as fast as I could generate it.   After surfing around a bit, I found the following excellent comment in a post on side splitting  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/10363/my-bread-keeps-quotsplittingquot-side#comment-54369.   So I surfed around some more for steaming methods that didn't involve going out and buying rocks and I found the following:  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/20162/oven-steaming-my-new-favorite-way and I tried it and dramatic improvement.    But it involved a little too much mucking around with steaming hot towels so I experimented some more and came up with a similar, but what seemed to me like a simpler and safer method.   I placed some soaked towels into bread pans half filled with unheated tap water on each side of my stone half an hour before loading the loaves, and let them preheat with everything else.   By the time I loaded the loaves, I got hit in the face with a cloud of steam.   Then fifteen minutes later, I removed the bread pans (with a long tongs) and once again got hit in the face with a cloud of steam, so I figured that the oven had been steamy enough in the interim.    The bottom line is the cuts opened, and the sides did not.   In fact they opened too much.   I have overdone it.   Too much steam?   Something else?   By the way, this site is just fantastic.   I would still be baking out of Clayton using speed em up 70s methods if it hadn't been for all of you.

I have a double whammy here.

Alright so I've been making bread lately (along with everyone else in the forum), and I've been having a few problems, about scoring bread, and refrigerating bread. First, about the scoring, i use our biggest knife, and spray it with pam, but it still get a lackluster score in the bread and ends up deflating it. Any help?

Second, about the refrigeration, I think my refrigerator may be too cold to have dough ferment in it because it's about 5-7 degrees celsius. However, it may have being the leavening agent that i used that stopped it from rising. Any help?

Thanks.

I have recently moved from baking Boules (which I usually scored in a square around the edges and got a decent grigne much of the time) to attempting baguettes.

But I can't seem to get the slashes to work right.  

I'm visiting my wife's family, so don't have my own oven, grains, bannetons, etc.  (I packed a smal piece of my sourdough in my luggage though, which my wife thinks is bordering on obsessive, but that's another story ;-)

I think I managed to compensate for the new environment and make a fairly reasonable batch of whole grain sourdough baguettes (about 40% whole wheat flour, with what my mother in law calls "Porridge Oats"--oats with other assorted mystery grains and seeds).  

Fed white sourdough and soaked WW flour and grains overnight, then mixed and raised slowly over the early afternoon, shaped at dinnertime, doing the final proof in improvised baskets (bread pans lined with floured dishtowels), retarded overnight,.  I took the loaves out of the fridge at about 4:00 am this morning (then back to bed), up at 6:30 to preheat the oven, baked at about 7:00 for family breakfast at 8:30.

I had lots of steam in the oven from a big solid cookie pan that I put boiling water into before and after I loaded the loaves.  The oven was still steamy enough to momentarily fog up my glasses when I opened the oven to rotate the loaves after 15 minutes.

The crumb is smooth and deliciously cool, the crust is thin, caramelized mahogany brown and crackly, with little blisters all over.  (Photos below.)

But I just can't get the slashes right.  Even with a new, very sharp, kraft-knife blade, held at about 30° from parallel to the loaf's skin, I cant get the slashes to open up much.

The whole inside of the slash filled in nicely and expanded just a little to make the place where the slashes were completely even with the rest of the crust.  But they don't open further (no grigne). So it seems like the internal pressure is sufficient, but either the steam is not enough or the slashes are done clumsily.

I recall PR recommending that one say "slit" as one slashes confidently, but the higher hydration dough "grabs" the blade as I slash the loaves.  So I feel like I have to be extra gentle or I'll maul and collapse the proofed loaves.  I end up gently cutting, and then going over the cuts again to get the slashes about 1/4 inch deep.

From the photos below, I hope some of you can give advice.

I'd appreciate any hints, please, on what to do differently.  Deeper or shallower cuts?  Different shape cuts from the vaguely "S" shaped slashes I used? Wet the blade? Proof a little less so the loaves are not so fragile?

Thanks,

Mason.

The top slash here looks like it tried to pull apart further at the very top, but just didn't manage to pull it off.

I recently baked, for the third time, two sourdough boules, which besides the primary purpose: Eating, tested the effects of slashing, and steaming methods, and the behavior of a new starter. The latter is posted elswhere (Purchased Dried Starter Reactivation Survey).

These loaves were slashed identically, placed in the oven simultaneously, and swapped position after 15 minutes of steaming. The ovenspring realized is shown here,

and from this placement the loaves look acceptably identical. But...

...this is the position they were initially placed in the oven. (Note the asymmetric ovenspring outside-to-center of both loaves. 

I normally create steam with a towel-lined half-sheet pan, wetted with boiling water, and placed below the baking stone. This time, thinking I could direct the steam more toward the edges of the stone and, therefore, better direct the maximum volume of the steam upward toward the loaves, I rolled two small towels and placed them on the extreme ends of the half-sheet pan. 

Two of our regular problem analysts, David and Eric, have argued steam condensing on the bottom of a baking stone causes the stone's surface to cool, and effects ovenspring. I've been a bit skeptical, but I am no longer. It is evident that the rolled towels did focus the steam's rise. but the seventeen-inch pan, below a twenty-inch baking stone created an asymmetric cooled surface on the stone, as is evidenced by the lesser ovenspring on the left and right sides of the left and right loaf respectively. 

Subsequently, I tried placing the pan above the loaves (I've tried it before), rather than below the stone (and the loaves), but I'm still disappointed with the results. I've returned to steaming from below, using a half-sheet pan fully-lined with wetted towels. The ovenspring is again uniform across the loaves, but I suspect reduced from what it could be, due cooling from condensing steam across the entire bottom of the baking stone.

I'm once again rethinking my steaming process. I like the control the wetted towel vs. lava rocks gives me--I can remove the pan safely when steaming time is completed, but I don't want the stone cooling effect. I'm thinking of fabricating and placing two narrow aluminum troughs in the spaces between the stone and the oven's wall, and filling them with wetted towels five or six minutes before loading the loaves. This, of course, will interrupt the heat convection paths on the sides of the stone, but I'm not certain, nor can I guess, how that will effect the baking.

Stay tuned;-)

David G.