Hi all, my first post on TFL! A newbie for a little advice for the experts!

Every couple months I set aside a day to make bauguettes and batards - white and brown, 20 or so at a time, for freezing. I've been doing this for about a year, been quite pleased with the outcome. I originally used the CIA baguette recipe, and then moved to Peter Reinhart's recipes.

The challenge I'm facing is with the scoring - the first time I made the baguettes I followed the CIA video, which involvec compressing the dough as it was being folded into the torpedo shape, presumably squishing out lots of the CO2 - the bread tasked great, the scrong was perfect, but the texture didn't have decent holes. Since then I've experimented with all sorts recipes, poolish, long fermentaiton times. Every single time the bread expands pushing the scoring right out - but the texture is very nice. I often take a dowel and squash a batard along the middle, almost right down to the counter - early on this resulted in a rather pleasing score all the way along the middle of the bread, recently, like the baguettes, the scoring simply disappears as the bread expands. I've tried short, long and very long rises - still the same result.

Any assistance would be most appreciated. Cheers, Jonathan