Avoid this STUPID MISTAKE when Scoring Doughs

chat about gluten in

this

video I want to show you how a small

stupid

mistake

when

marking a bread dough can make the difference between a poor oven spring and a huge one. Interestingly, who would have guessed that the baguettes would ultimately give me the final clue to what I was doing? wrong, it turned out that

this

error is not that obvious and many online resources give you incorrect information anyway. I will show you how to

avoid

this and after watching this video you will have a much better understanding of how to make bread and what scars are. part where you give the bread a small incision before baking it, if you do everything right you will get a nice spring for the oven, you will have a beautiful ear on your bread, although this year it is the holy grail of bread making, the ear it just goes to show that you have nailed every piece of the whole process, the ear is a little smaller, it gets darker and crispier as it bakes,

when

you then eat a slice you will have all different colors, each color of your crust gives you a different taste if you have that ear. you'll never want to go back it's just an explosion of flavor in your mouth the problem with

scoring

is that it happens at the end of the process and you only have one chance to get it right you can't re-score a dough this means you have to pin to score the bread, you can use a knife, make sure it's a very very sharp knife, there are also specialized tools, like lame alarm, I think alarm is the right name, but probably the best way is to just get a razor blade.

Get yourself a fancy handle for your razor blade, so this is one of the fancy tools for example, and all you have to do is put your razor blade inside, but I really think the best tool you can use is just a simple razor blade, be careful. However, because it's relatively sharp now, I've been baking bread for a few years, but occasionally I sometimes didn't make it in the spring and for a baker it's a very, very sad time, if you've been there, do you know what I'm like? ? Talking about how you spend so much time making the perfect dough and then the bread turns out flat, it's so sad now bad oven spring can be due to a variety of reasons: too much water for the flour, you proof it too little, you proof it too long you bake too hot you bake too cold you don't have enough steam there are so many problems in fact about a year ago I made a video where I showed you how a difference of around 20 degrees can be all the difference between a huge oven spring and poor oven spring with just lower the temperature a bit for me, I started getting much better bread anyway, the

scoring

part is not that easy and I think it's a big factor that you need to correct and embarrass me after re-watching my old masterclass on sourdough bread, even I'm not explaining it correctly, but I hope we get it right this time.

The problem became very apparent when I was trying to make baguettes. Baguettes are not too easy because you have to practice the shape. The technique and loading them into the oven is a little tricky now if you realize you still have to score them and I personally think this is the most challenging part of making baguettes. Perfect baguettes should open very well in the oven. oven and you have several beautiful ears, then you have a soft fluffy crumb combined with that slight crunchy texture, it's perfect, unfortunately although mine didn't open and this is where it gets really interesting, the engineer in me wanted to debug this and to begin with I thought it was okay.

It could be fermentation, fermentation is typically where most beginners make

mistake

s. Fermentation times always change depending on ambient temperature. If you only feed your sour

doughs

that are slightly different if you use more or less yeast, it's crazy to simplify everything. I resorted to drastic measures. and I started using just yeast sourdough it's a little more complicated, okay it's actually a little more complicated, but after a few tries I still couldn't get my baguettes to open properly. What was I doing wrong? It had to be like this. a steam problem a temperature problem or maybe a punctuation problem now my friend sebastian lives in ghana hi he is also one of the pandemic bakers and he is really making great baguettes and just the other day he sent me a photo and his baguettes They opened up much more. that my baguettes still didn't have that perfect ear yet, if you don't care about the ear, I think they open 10 times better than mine, so what was I doing wrong now?

The video Sebastian used is Patrick Ryan's baguette master. class and it's a really great video that I recommend you watch, let's take a quick look at the video. Patrick is such a good instructor for making red. I could watch his videos for hours and this one is simply about how to make the perfect baguette. I can't think of French bread or Arkansas bread without taking away the baguettes. It's true, so we'll show you how easy it is to do. Now this recipe is a little different. He needs to be making excellent baguettes, but now let's fast.

Go ahead, please watch the full video here. I think first of all I just want to show it to you quickly from here. This has always been very difficult for me to load the baguettes into the oven. What I recommend you do is just get a little bit. of cardboard and that will make everything very simple because in the end your dough is very, very extensible and it just turns into a giant sausage. Well, we Germans love sausages, but it's nothing you want for making baguettes and now let's see how to rate the oven. is that we have to score them again, a lot of people when there's a fancy scoring knife here, when you're scoring it engenders by the way it looks when it's finished, the tendency is to cut straight across the dough, what we're looking for it's almost straight lines, each one just displaces the next one, it will look like an ear of wheat and then the next one starts right behind it, basically try to make a straight line because you won't, so he cuts almost without any angle and lets it I show you what happens in the end with the baguettes, beautiful, light, beautiful and crispy, they open up a little bit, but you don't have that pronounced ear in the baguettes, beautiful, crispy, lovely and rustic, and you can actually hear them singing just when you come. out of the oven you don't hear any crackling, you're on a break when you get it, you can hear your bread afterwards when you take it out of the oven, it's very satisfying, so yeah, it's definitely a great Patrick Ryan video, please watch that.

I'll link it in the description. I think the baguettes look great, but I still think the ear could be improved a little. Maybe I'm a big perfectionist, but I really wanted to have that here. I wanted my bread to sprout massively. in the oven, my baguettes are bread baguettes, so let's dig a little deeper into that because this is a very, very, very good lesson and it's not so obvious to me scoring baguettes is really the hardest part, your dough is not cold , it's at room temperature and making dough at room temperature is pretty difficult, you're going to break that dough up, so I did more research and found two additional great videos.

The first is a classic video that only focuses on the baguette. This video here is so amazing that it's a video for about three minutes, just focusing on how you should get the perfect baguette. Hello, welcome back to the bread lab, today we'll be Hi Mac, showing you some techniques for grading baguettes. Did you just say bread lab which sounds exactly like the place? where I want to work, so what Mag does is Mac marks the baguettes with different lines and at the end he shows you how the baguettes open depending on how you graded them.

I think it is a very revealing video and let's check it out. how Mac here is grading them for expansion at this point along the bread, okay, that also doesn't leave room for expansion at these points by cutting the bread in a straight line, essentially downward, which is breaking it in half , allowing it to expand. So I was trying the technique that Mac showed me, but unfortunately it got a little better, but still not in a way that I was super happy with the final baguettes he was making. I think it's a super useful video. I'll link in the video description.

Okay, a quick hand motion holding your hand at a little bit of an angle. I tried but couldn't really get it to work, maybe I just need to practice with a few more thousand. baguettes now I'm just a home baker so for me that's very difficult but then I saw another video that would give me the final clue. It's a video from Carl and the Sourdough Library, let's check it out and it finally clicked for real. This video that I'm about to show you has been very eye-opening for me, so let's look at this, that's it, that's my song, he's one of our bakers and he's from France, so that's all I'm inviting.

The song knows what it is, I can guarantee it. you two to cut the rest of the baguettes so that they are perfect yes, please, hold the knife like this, not like that, okay, it's going, it's smooth as butter. Now we have the six baguettes, two with seven cups, two with five, show me the baguettes. Please ready, this is exactly the kind of baguette I want to make at some point. This is perfect. The difference between seven and five that you draw on the baguette. Make sure you overlap a third of the cuts you have to cut. uneven three five or seven depending on the length of the baguette and as Vasa told us, it is very important, okay, listen to this, now it is important to keep the knife as horizontal as possible so that you can reach below the surface of the baguette to that the strip can break.

Open it and don't just open it so don't cut like that make sure the blade is very sharp so I think this for me has been the biggest game changing tip. Super cool video. I'll also link it in the description. thank you very much carl and this song of course the most important tip is that you have to skin the dough at a horizontal angle at a horizontal angle, let's actually take a look at my original sardinian masterclass. What was he saying now? We have to be a little quick, I'm making that 45 degree incision because I want to have a good ear at the end.

I was saying that you have to mark around a 45 degree angle. Now horizontal does not equal 45 degrees if my calculations are correct and all the other sources you find on the internet generally suggest you score at a 45 degree angle and that's always what I've been doing but it turned out this is wrong, well , not bad, but not entirely true either, so I was really scoring. at a 45 degree angle, no I wasn't, turns out I was actually scoring at a 90 degree angle and you wouldn't believe how

stupid

I was, it's really obvious now that I think about it now if you're scoring your breath. although in the center, directly in the middle, so marking at a 45 degree angle is kind of obvious, okay, I'm really bad at making angles, but this is the angle you want, but most recipes don't call for marking directly . in the center they ask for a score slightly off one centimeter to the right, which I guess is half an inch, now one centimeter to the right, a 45 degree angle is no longer a 45 degree angle, let's quickly go to my white board, I need to visualize this for you and that will become obvious, so the important thing to learn here is how to score.

This is a 90 degree angle and this is a 45 degree angle and everyone will always tell you to score at a 45 degree angle. Now your breathing probably looks like this, so if you're scoring here then your angle will be 90 degrees from the top, although it looks like 45 degrees, so in that case you really have to go much lower, this would be an angle of 45 degrees. way you have to mark it here so that your razor blade is almost horizontal with respect to the dough and this is a really very important lesson, so one centimeter to the right I'm no longer marking at a 45 degree angle, I'm more marking at a 90 degree angle because the dough is round, in this case you almost have to hold the razor blade horizontally, just like Carl said, skinning at a horizontal angle and yes, it worked wonderfully, I marked the dosage at about half a centimeter of Depth, as far as I can tell, the puffier your dough is, the less deep you'll want to score it.

If you have a relatively stiff dough, you'll want to score it a little deeper in a stiff position, although I would be scoring about a centimeter deep. with a puffier, highly hydrated dough, not as deep, just half a centimeter, that will make a bit of a difference in terms of how much the bread will open to the sides, but it will mark at an angle that will make a difference, so I went back to my baguettes and suddenly I started to see a little ear. It's still not perfect, but I think I'm getting there incredibly, and a little crazy, just by adjusting the angle at which you're scoring your dough. get more oven spring and you'll finally get that ear to really pop.

I wish all of this was written down somewhere with aexplanation so I don't have to debug it on my own. Another really good final tip I want to give you is that after you mix the ingredients, make a nice round, smooth ball of dough and just start scoring that ball of dough like crazy. You can try many things. Pay close attention to what a 45 and 90 degree angle is. Practice this, it's at room temperature so it's even harder. This helped me a lot to improve my score. Do you have additional comments on the score? Leave them in the comments section and show me some bread love.

Not really for the bread, but you know I'm a baker so if you're not on our discord server yet make sure to join, it's an amazing community of like-minded bakers and it's completely free I'll be sharing the link in the description from the video thank you very much goodbye why am I always making those stupid jokes that no one finds funny I'm weird