#BREAD LAME TECHNIQUE PROFESSIONAL#

Professional bakers use a stainless steel metal handle called a 'lame' (pronounced la-meh) onto which the razor blade is attached by slightly bending the blade, forming a curved cutting edge. Aside from a surgeon's scalpel, this is the sharpest utensil available to the home baker and the cheapest. Not the kind where the blade is inseparably attached to a plastic handle for shaving, but simply the paper-thin metal blade itself. To score your loaves you will need one simple tool - a razor blade. Using this technique you can accentuate the appearance of your loaf, for example more outwardly expanding, more vertically expanding, lengthways, sideways, etc. What happens in fact is that when you score a loaf by cutting a slit into the dough, that slit expands during the bake, allowing the entire loaf to fully rise and also creating an attractive pattern on the crust of the loaf.īy altering the orientation of the scoring and the density (distance from one cut to another), you control which direction the bread will rise in. This exposed inner dough will have more time to rise and expand before itself drying out as the baking proceeds and will therefore allow the entire loaf to rise fully without bursting through a completely dried crust. When the bread is then baked, the outer crust will dry at a quicker rate than the exposed, moister inner dough. If however, immediately prior to baking you score the bread, you thereby expose the moister, inner dough. This is amplified as the bread begins to bake and the first part of the bread to dry out is the outer crust. The assumption is that the outer crust is less moist (drier) than the dough beneath. Scoring helps to lessen the above phenomena (it does not eliminate them entirely as there are other factors involved), but it definitely increases the baker's control over the final appearance of his loaf. What usually happens in this case is that the bread bursts through the crust randomly (usually at the weakest spot) and the resulting appearance is not attractive.

In this case the bread has no possibility to further expand as it is 'trapped' by the dry outer crust.

If however, some parts are less tightly stretched than others, they will bulge more and the resulting bread will look something like a drunk camel (with many humps).Įven more severe is if the crust of the bread dries out before the inner crumb has fully risen. If you are a very proficient baker and so adept at shaping your loaf so that it has an almost uniform tension over the entire exposed surface, then the loaf will rise uniformly in all directions when it is baked. If a bread is not scored, the way it rises is highly dependent on how it was shaped and baked. Eventually scoring became an additional tool in the baker's arsenal which allowed him to gain further control over the appearance of his loaf.Īll bread rises in the oven while it is baked. This was not the original intention of scoring when it was invented, but evolved as professional bakers experimented and observed the effects of different scoring patterns and how they manifested in the final baked product. The most well known of course is the baguette, with its parallel diagonal scoring pattern in the crust.Īside from simply looking good however, scoring has an additional purpose. Many classic French loaves owe their characteristic appearance to the patterns that were 'scored' (or cut) into the loaves. Nowhere was this phenomenon more prevalent than in France. Scoring developed into something of an art form and the aristocracy enjoyed highly attractive calligraphy on their breads, with insignia, initials etc. This was the origin of the technique known as 'scoring' or cutting slits in the crust of the dough. Understandably, with many people using the same oven simultaneously, confusion was very common and in order to identify which loaf belonged to whom, each family made their own markings on the loaf, by cutting a pattern or initial into the crust.

Depending on the size and population of the village, baking was scheduled on different days of the week and each family was allotted a specific day and time to use the oven. As a result, large central communal ovens were constructed that served the entire village or community, financed either by a magnanimous aristocrat or by the pooling of the meagre individual resources.Įach housewife prepared her own dough at home and then took it to the communal oven to bake. The simple folk, being mostly poor, could not afford such luxuries. Only the very wealthy could afford to construct their own private brick ovens in spacious estate kitchens. As little as 300 years ago in Europe, bread baking was a communal activity.

Bread lame technique