Scoring Sourdough Bread in the Bakery with Emerald | Proof Bread

[Music] all right so i'm just getting my day started off i get here at four in the morning most days and the first thing i did was fire off the pastry that's going to be packaged and delivered today and now i'm moving on to bread as i trap myself in this labyrinth um so i have to refer to what's called a par sheet and so this lets me know everything that's been ordered and so i can bake to order to ensure that everything is nice and fresh this is our last week before we go on our two-week summer break and before the pandemic we used to have all of these varieties of sourdough that we would do every week and we scaled back on that once the pandemic hit so that we could focus on making a little bit of more of all of the what are more considered more essential items just the plain sourdough our sandwich loaves english muffins and two different kinds of pastry but we've been gradually bringing back some of the specials week to week and we thought it would be a really nice kind of send off before our summer break to bring back everybody's favorites my favorites included i'm a big fan of our fruit and nut bread i'm excited to have some of those to throw in my freezer for the break makes really good french toast and it's our standard fruit and nut recipe um we'll change up the kind of fruit and nut in here occasionally but our standard is this cranberry and walnut so i'm just pulling what i need to bake of the specials out of the fridge and bringing it over to the bake room so i just have everything ready to go on hand making sure i have all of my counts right since we're shifting over to this daily at-home delivery we're getting a lot more precise in the amounts that we bake off opposed to how we did it before where it was the wednesday market and the saturday market so we're still kind of adjusting but it gets a little more precise week to week so i'm just gonna double check to make sure i have everything i need four baguettes 14 of each special six six and two six six and two all right looks good so we bake our bread straight from the fridge the colder it is the easier it is to control the fermentation process and prevent it from over proofing and so it's especially important over the summer to keep the bread cold for as long as possible we have these tarps lined up i could probably take this down because it's blocking out the heat that comes in from the oven room into the mixing room while the guys are mixing the pastry dough and the sourdough and a lot of the heat in the bakery comes from the oven room so we keep those tarps up to kind of block some of the heat going in and works really well all of our bread that gets baked in this oven gets baked at the same temperature aside from the baguettes it gets a little bit hotter in there and that's what helps it give the baguettes the signature crust so what i'm doing here is i'm pulling out these boards this is what i'll transfer the bread onto when i score it and then it's what helps me transfer the bread into the oven since we baked directly on the stone i put a nice layer of bran down first brand being a by-product that's sifted out of the flour when it's milled and it just helps keep a nice protective layer on the bottom of the bread to prevent it from burning and so you might notice that the bottom of our bread is a different color just from the brand all right so i'm going to start off with the baguettes here amanda is definitely the master of baguettes in here but i think i do a pretty okay job so i'm just placing these down typically do forward or a board and i have exactly four so that's perfect when you're laying or at least when i'm spacing these out on the board i'm i'm gonna try to keep it exactly this way when i transfer it into the oven and that's the tricky part especially with baguettes amanda has a lot more finesse than i do in that regard if you don't transfer them straight and have them be this the same exact shape that they are on the board then they can they're sub they're suspect to curve and distort and shape these couches from the baguettes get a little wet so i just hang them up to dry them out before we use them again you don't want them to get moldy all right so next i top them off with rice flour this is purely for aesthetics so what the rice flour does is that it keeps the surface of the bread that we're baking nice and white and it gives it a nice contrast between the bread and the scoring and it really makes it pop and that's especially important when i get into decorative scoring but i'll get into that later scoring baguettes is really the only place where any of us feel like a traditional alarm works better than the other kind of lawn we use it's really designed to cut right underneath the lip or right underneath the skin of the baguette to create that really nice open ear as amanda's covered before when you're scoring baguettes you're really working in the middle third and you don't want to stray outside of that and so what i'm gonna do in the middle third kind of from left to right is do three lines you can do four if you're feeling fancy today i'm not really feeling that bold so as you're scoring you want the blade to almost be horizontal and what's or to just be laying flat on top of the skin and so what you're aiming to do is just cutting directly underneath the skin you're not cutting down you're cutting from the side and so if you've seen there like i'm i really have a narrow range between each score there's only a little bit in between and ideally that little island will stay intact as it bakes and as i'm scoring these lines there's only about an inch of overlap we used to make baguettes every week and i think i was more confident in my baguette scoring then but it's been a little while so i'm feeling a little rusty all right first thing i always do is check to make sure there's no brand residue left over all right so this is the tricky part i was talking about so as i'm kind of shoving the board i'm trying to make them transfer in flat and all right here we go hey not too bad any kind of hesitation in your movement when you're transferring the baguettes can cause chaos so you really just have to be smooth and confident in your movement even if you're not necessarily feeling smooth and confident so we're doing 15 minutes with steam for the first round so each variety of our bread gets scored in a different way just so no matter if we change the type of mix ins inside like with the fruit and nut if we change the type of fruit and nut you can always tell what it is just by looking at the scoring so for example the olive loaves get a nice little x scoring on top which is nice and simple it's a very classic type of functional scoring and what i mean by functional scoring is well i guess i should start with what scoring is to begin with so scoring is just the cuts that you make into a loaf of bread and there's two different kinds of scoring i can't say that these are official terms for what they're called if they're not just pretend that they are for the sake of this conversation so the first type is functional scoring so functional scoring are the deeper cuts that are made into a loaf of bread that helps the bread bake into the ideal shape that you want when left to its own devices if you were to just throw a loaf of unscored bread in the oven as it bakes and expands and steam is being released from inside the loaf it'll find the weakest point in the loaf to break open and so you can control where it breaks by making the cuts yourself and also if you don't score the bread there's a big chance that the skin of the bread won't break open at all and it'll just bake in a really condensed and constricted shape and it'll end up being smaller in size even if it's the same amount of dough than it would have if you scored it so i'm just testing this rice flour here i distribute it with my hand and now we're back to my favorite lawn so among sourdough bakers this is universally agreed to be the gold standard of lambs it's made by a shop called wire monkey shop and the appeal of this kind of lawn is that it gives you a lot of control when you compare it to the traditional alarm your hand is kind of so far removed from where the blade is that you kind of you lose a lot of control which is you know if you're just opting for functional scoring it's not a big deal but as you get into decorative scoring it's the closest that you can get to just holding a razor in your hand which you know for maybe obvious reasons is not advised it's the closest you can get to essentially drawing with a razor so i'm doing here is the x-scoring that i mentioned earlier and it's the same thing with the baguette scoring with the angle of the blade i'm not cutting straight down and what scoring in this way does is it creates these little mini ears and so the shape that i'm going for with this scoring is to have these um kind of rise up into these little cat ears and this is just a really classic and basic form of functional scoring all right try to set the oven make sure the vents closed [Music] those are good to go to the next one so i'm just redistributing the brand that was left on the board from the last round so that i don't have to continually add or i can just add to the places that are a little sparse slow light dusting although admittedly i think i use more brand than anyone else in the bakery i had a couple weeks where i was having issues with the bottom of the loaves being burnt and i haven't quite recovered from that fear i've always thought the fruit and nut loaves are really pretty we soak the cranberries before mixing them in with the dough and so once they're mixed in the juices leak out and it creates this really pretty marbling inside of each loaf which is a really nice effect so it's always a surprise to cut them open and see which see what each loaf is like so the scoring pattern for this one again working in the middle third and working at this horizontal angle i do two long slashes with a little bit of overlap and then just a little wheat stock here and then a little weed stock here and so no matter what's in the fruit and not people selling at the market and our regular customers who are familiar with how each loaf of bread looks can just easily identify it by the scoring pattern most sourdough bakers at home will score on top of a rotating cake stand which is really useful but not really practical for the volume i'm doing here rotating these boards can be a little clunky but it would take a lot more time to transfer each individual loaf also i try to score these kinds of loaves last just because the mix-ins in in the loaf degrade the blade down and make it dull faster but i always recommend using a fresh blade a lot of people ask me if getting a fancy lawn is necessary and you know depending on what you're doing it's really not if you're not trying to do intricate decorative scoring you really don't need something like this but if you're trying to make artistic designs makes it a lot easier i probably go through an average of four razors a day depending on what i'm doing all right these are ready to go in this deck could probably use a little bit of a stretcher sweep any brand left in the oven will burn and then if you're just to put bread on top of the burnt brand then it kind of negates the whole purpose of putting bran down on the boards to begin with uh all right and they go i'm always paranoid that i've left a loaf in a banana and that it'll get forgotten it's only happened once but once was enough all right now we're moving on to sourdough today's tuesday which is pretty light as far as production days go on any given day i'm scoring and baking one to five speed racks of sourdough in addition to any possible english muffins sandwich loaves and all the pastry so since it's com summer i've been coming in earlier before i was coming in anywhere from six to nine a.m but now that it's summer in arizona and it gets pretty hot fairly quickly i come in at four to get things going ideally to try to beat the heat it gets really hot in here which is uncomfortable but also it causes the bread to prove faster than is ideal as it's just sitting out on the rack waiting to be baked so the first round with the baguettes is done everything looks good i'm opening up the steam vent once the seam is released that's when you really get the nice color and then the crust starts to harden my role here at proof while i do a little bit of everything is to bake and score the bread i don't think it's my official job title but john has referred to me before as the bread artist here and so the special role that i fulfill is making each loaf unique with my scoring and so really the purpose of doing that is not just to make a pretty loaf but it's it's supposed to be a visual represent representation of all the work that everyone else does before it reaches me you know it's really important that people see and know that this whole process is done by people and by hand most sourdough bakeries if they do anything any kind of decorative scoring at all it's really basic when i first started here i spent some time with amanda on the table where she showed me the ropes and then they really just gave me free reign to score as i wish when i'm teaching other people in the bakery how to score i have them focus on really learning and mastering and getting comfortable with the wheat sock pattern it's a really basic and classic pattern and once you get really comfortable with that you're probably at a point where you're really in tune with how your bread should feel how it should look how the using the lawn should feel in your hand and there's really an infinite number of patterns that you can utilize just from learning the wheat stock so i'm just going to do a few examples of a basic wheat stock here so it's all about the angle in a weed stock something that i've noticed in myself and other people i've been teaching in the bakery is that the angle that they're using for the wheat stock isn't quite sharp enough i would say that you want to be scoring at like a five degree angle when i first started doing it certainly i was kind of doing it at too wide of an angle which is you know do whatever you want each everybody here certainly and every sourdough baker i know has their own unique style and flair that i really enjoy so i'll just start by and this is where you for decorative scoring is where you really cut want to cut straight down so i'm just doing like if you imagine a straight line here i'm just scoring along that straight line and then i repeat the same thing on the other side leaving a little bit of a gap and then i finish it off with one line pointing straight up and if you'll notice as i'm cutting you should see the scoring start to open up almost immediately if your scoring isn't opening up immediately it might be due to there not being adequate tension that's built up in the low from folding and shaping and then what i'm doing here is an example of a functional score that i mentioned earlier and this is what is gonna bring out the loaf it's gonna bacon expand into the desired shape that i'm going for and i and hopefully it'll give me a nice ear so once you really get used to and comfortable with scoring a wheat stock it becomes second nature you know i don't even really have to think about it the one thing i like to do on the bake table is i like to think about how many variations i can come up with of of the same design and so for the wheat stock how many different ways can i score a single wheat stock well i can change it up by scoring it a little lighter and so i'm cutting fairly deep here i tend to like just kind of a a bold weed stock by default but here i can start to score it and so here i'm not cutting nearly as deep and this is going to be a little bit more of an elegant and delicate look you'll see with the ear here i'm scoring this at about what would you say that is like a 30 degree angle and it's not a straight line down it starts and ends at the middle point but it just curves out very slightly and you want to do this at about the three-quarter mark of the loaf some other ways you can mix up the weed stock i can do like a long and deeper score and then the kind of lighter and shorter one and alternate and there's no reason why you would need to neglect this side of the loaf you can add a little bit of flare there let me check on these baguettes so the scoring has opened up pretty nicely you can see these lips and ridges that open up the little islands in between have maintained in their shape but they're a little light in color so i'm gonna let them hang out in here for a little longer three minutes seems to be the magic number so when i was first starting out you know i spent a lot of time with amanda on the table well i spent a couple weeks and then i was kind of just let loose she taught me a lot of the basics but there's there's just a lot that you can't really learn before you're doing it yourself a lot of it has to do with knowing your bread knowing the way it's supposed to feel and just learning the muscle memory that comes with really any kind of skill and while there's a lot of resources out there on how to make sourdough there's really not anything when it comes to scoring outside of how to do really basic functional scoring like doing the x score getting an ear and then maybe just a really basic weed stock but if you're interested in making decorative designs on your loaf you're really just kind of on your own there are a lot of sourdough bakers on instagram that do really beautiful decorative scoring if you're interested in kind of keeping up with those bakers and the unique designs that they do you can look up the hashtag breadscoring on instagram and a lot of them will make time lapses of them scoring their their loaves which has been really helpful but in a time lapse where there's no audio overlay they're not really telling you what they're doing why they're doing it and so while it's helpful to have one level of just seeing how it's done i've had to spend a lot of time just experimenting to figure out what works and what doesn't and having to do a lot of troubleshooting as to why something i was trying to do didn't turn out and in my experience sourdough bakers online are incredibly friendly and helpful and if you ask them questions you know i've never personally had an experience where someone was trying to hold their secrets close to their their chest and wasn't willing to help other people but you really have to do the work to seek out that information yourself i think the baguettes are good probably could have done a little bit of a neater job here the lines are a bit cleaner here they're a little bit jagged here the bread can smell your fear if you aren't sure of yourself and your pressure and your movements the bread will call you out it'll snag it'll ripple which you know maybe that's something that most people aren't even gonna notice but i notice and that's what matters so i was mentioning earlier there's two different kinds of scoring functional scoring and decorative scoring and the functional scoring is what shapes the loaf into the desired shape as it bakes and then the decorative scoring is you know just the pretty stuff and that's really what my specialty is here as a bread artist is to make the bread pretty people only see the way that the outside of the bread looks as they're passing by our market as they're looking online most sourdough bakeries don't bother to do any kind of decorative scoring it takes too much time it takes a certain level of skill it just doesn't really see it as being worth the time and so it's nice to have the creative freedom and liberty that i get in this role to score whatever suits my fancy i'm always trying to come up with new designs i'd like to think that regular customers of ours whenever they open a pre-order that they got from the market or get a home delivery i hope that they get something different each time so this is where the use of rice flour really comes into play it's going to help differentiate between the parts of the bread that are scored in the parts that aren't because the surface of the low should stay nice and white while the scoring will open up deepen in color give a nice contrast so essentially with decorative scoring all i'm doing is drawing on bread with a razor and i scored enough to kind of experiment and see what works and what doesn't but it's also really kind of difficult to keep track of i'm constantly scoring and putting loaves in the oven and so i might not necessarily remember what i did with one particular design to make it work or make it not work i'm really inspired about i'm really inspired by you know the things around me i'm new to arizona the desert is really still kind of a novelty to me i like to score cacti desert scenes fruit and vegetables that are in season i like to keep things joyful and whimsical every time i open the oven i've really got to look at what's in there and assess and assess how i should change any kind of settings and baking times each deck acts in a different way there's different hot spots in each one changes in the temperature atmospheric pressure humidity everything affects the way that the bread bakes and so especially for the first round of the day i've really got to keep in tune with how the oven is behaving so i can make sure to make any alterations for the rest of the bake all right so some things to keep in mind when you're scoring there is a finite amount of tension that's built in the loaf and so that's what's coming into play when you're scoring and the lines start to open up it's reacting to the tension that's built and spreading open if you're to make too many cuts into the bread that's going to affect any kind of functional scoring that you do like the ear if i cut if i score too closely too deeply to the ear the tension heat that's here is going to be competing between the decorative scoring and the ear and so you might lose some height that you get with the ear opening up because of how you implemented any decorative scoring another thing which i noticed exactly when i did it is you also don't really want to be scoring too deeply on kind of the bottom edge of the bread that's another place where typically when this happens this scoring is going to be competing with this score here and what's likely going to happen here is that this is going to split open in a way that i don't want another thing that i recommend to people who are learning how to score you know once you learn how to do the basic weed stock and you really get comfortable with it continue on that trend of figuring out a design and sticking with it until you're comfortable one thing that i definitely did a lot when i was first starting out is that i would score something it wouldn't turn out the way i wanted i would get frustrated and then i'd move on to something else and it would just be kind of a vicious cycle even though i've i have stood in this spot for many days and many hours i still sometimes find myself looking at a blank loaf of bread and being like wow i've never scored before in my life i have no idea what to do and so a lot of times i'll ask for suggestions from other people in the bakery to kind of just give me some inspiration i tend to um score a design until it's something i'm comfortable with and then i do it a lot and i get kind of stuck in a little bit of a creative rut all right we've got our olive loaves here and these ears are coming out exactly the way that i wanted to the x shape is really nice for keeping a nice round loaf in the shape that you want while still having you know a really aesthetically pleasing look to it these could use a bit more color these olive loaves don't really ever get as hard as a crust as the other ones just because the hydration level is higher from the olives being mixed in strawberries are in season so i've been doing a lot of strawberries when radishes were first coming into season i did a lot of those when i first started here i always had this notebook handy for me to reference for the specific scoring that would be on like the fruit and nut loaf the multigrain loaf and then any ideas i might come up with for scoring patterns that i wanted to experiment with on the sourdough and like i mentioned earlier there are a lot of amazing and very skilled sourdough bread artist on instagram i'm always keeping up with what they're doing and a lot of us feed off of each other's styles and creativity getting used to the oven was a bit overwhelming at first there's always some kind of timer going off getting into the routine of when the vent is open when it's closed but i've come to know the oven really well and we have a very interesting relationship for better or worse being in the bake room all day does and in the heat it does weird things to you sometimes all right these are ready to come out so these nice little lips that you get here are result of scoring in line with the top of the the loaf instead of cutting straight down that's how you get these little lips these little mini ears gotta reset the oven set the timer close the vent and then possibly the most important part of scoring is saying a little prayer to the bread gods as it goes in for the bake ask that they be kind and merciful maybe give your bread a little bit of a pet of a pet talk pre-pandemic i used to work at one of the saturday markets and it's something that i really missed i really got to know the customers at my particular market once they knew me as the person who scored the bread i would get special requests they would ask me a lot of questions you know maybe they might have a sourdough baker in their family this is where i spend probably 99 of my time and i mean we bake bread to feed people and you know who isn't excited when you have bread just the reactions that i would get from people and the joy of being handed a beautiful loaf of bread something that would keep me inspired and so i've largely shifted to being part of the sourdough community on instagram but a lot of my old market regulars follow me on there and i get a little bit of the same interaction that i did before and most people don't have the same luxury that i do to have so many loaves of bread at their disposal which might make the fact that there's so little information out there about sourdough scoring pretty frustrating because you know someone's putting in all the time to mix fold shape and a single loaf and then to experiment you know they got to wait until next week to score another loaf and see what works so i'm really in a unique exp position to really play with this as much as i like to see what works and what doesn't and one thing that you might notice that i'm doing is i kind of pull the skin of the loaf taut here to create some more tension to make a little smoother when i cut into the for the ear another thing to keep in mind with scoring is that you don't want to over score because of the different scoring competing with attention it might not come out in the way that you wanted to and if there's too much scoring competing for the same amount of tension it won't necessarily open up in the way that you wanted to so i've dulled this razor and so i'm just going to switch it to the other side i just had to loosen it up part way and now the part that was hidden underneath these two little discs is now exposed and it's fresh so if you're finding that your loaf is uh is snagging a lot on your razor as you're scoring that could be coming from a few different things it'd be it could be coming from your loaf being too warm overproofed there might not be enough tension in the loaf or you might just have a dull razor it's really about being really familiar with with your bread and figuring out a baseline of what it's supposed to feel like so another thing that you can do to decorate your loaves you know maybe you're not confident in your scoring abilities or you know whatever reason you can use stencils and these are ones that i've designed myself i've been working on these i've got some that are just for proof i was experimenting with what size worked the best for the size of our loaves our lows are about 800 grams and i found that this largest one doesn't really work all that great i'm always experimenting with stuff like that and i started making stencils based off of my scoring patterns um john and amanda bought me a set of stencils that were advertised for using on sourdough bread but i found that the way that they're designed is really not made for bread which is why i started making my own so this is an example of some of the stuff that came in this pack that was made for stenciling on bread and as you can see it's this big clunky square and so this outside space is really necessary for when you're stenciling you know on a wall on a flat surface it's what you know keeps the paint where you want it and prevents any paint on this area what was referred to as overspray from getting where you don't want it but they're really meant to be used on flat surfaces and these loaves are curved and so it's really difficult to get to apply the stencil in the way that you want to especially if you're trying to add your design on the side of the loaf and still maintain a nice classic ear so this is a little bit of what i mean by that this little garden gnome guy is one of my scoring patterns that i've come up with and i've designed a stencil in a way to where if you want you can just place it down and you can cover the whole loaf with flour and not have to worry about this big awkward negative space this big square that's just going to be there and it's really just not appealing and then like you have to worry about these little tabs as you might notice this just fits it sits really well on top of the loaf whereas these just aren't really made to conform to any kind of curved surface and so to apply the stencil i'll get the loaf wet you don't want to get it too wet um if you get it too wet that the flour will get cakey on top and it will crack and get a little discolored and then you can just place a stencil on top and it should generally stick to the loaf when it's wet then take my rice flour you have to have a really gentle hand when you're applying flour to a stencil you don't want to overload it with flour like that it's not ideal but we can work with it all right these guys are ready to come out and so you can see an example of kind of my style of wheat stock here i really like those bold lines that's generally my go-to this end result tells me a lot about what happened at every stage up until this process of me scoring and baking it i can talk to whoever was on mixing and shaping about what might possibly need to be changed based on what i see from the end result for instance if i'm just not able to get an ear as i'm baking that could be due to a shaping issue that could be due to the fridge is not being cold enough it could be due to the bread not getting put in the fridge soon enough so when you're distributing the flour for stencils the general rule is you want to push from the inside out if you have any parts like this that are generally sticking up push the flower in a way that pushes it down you don't want to be pushing this way because then it'll push the flower underneath where you don't want the stencil and then just carefully peel it up there you have it happy little garden gnome the garden gnome was um a special request from a regular and i scored them once and i was just so delighted with it that i kept going and then ended up being one of the first stencils i made and speaking of um basic new designs off of old designs it's not that far off from my santa you know you change the proportions a little bit the hat is pointy doesn't have the little ball at the end especially when you pair it with pair the gnome with flowers gives you know something that's essentially the same design a whole different use and so another one of my favorite scoring designs that i came up with this little mushroom guy i guess part of my garden decoration series you want to make sure that you don't have an excessive buildup of flour in the negative space of the stencil or even just sitting on top of the stencil because as you peel it off the excess will fall into the parts of the design where you're trying to prevent it from going so i definitely recommend bread stencils if you're intimidated by scoring or if you just want to mix it up especially since you know these are my designs they're things i can do easily but it's a little less time consuming that's a pretty satisfying ear there it's a little small but it's got the right lift and the lip underneath and the gradient here on the exposed dough is always very satisfying so you might notice that this part isn't really sticking and that's okay you can kind of just hold any parts that stick up down as you apply the flower you just got to pay attention to which direction you're smoothing the flower one thing that never gets old no matter how much bread i bake is opening the door and seeing just like a line of really pretty ears it's really interesting to me i've been interested in bread making for a long time and i've been just generally into making art for a really long time but it wasn't until i started working here that i really thought of bread as something that could be an art medium this is as you can see here as i'm doing this score you can kind of see where it's snagging here i can definitely feel that this dough isn't as firm it's a little loose as you're feeling the top of your dough you should get really familiar with the way that it should feel like i can tell just by the way that it looks before i even touch it that the shape of the loaf has really expanded more than what's desired that could be from the bread not being shaped tightly enough it can be any number of things um part of my role here is always kind of adapting to each loaf in the condition that it's in when it gets to me and still trying to make the prettiest loaf possible with what's given and by no means is it not going to be edible is it not going to be delicious is it not still going to be a perfectly fine and acceptable and good looking loaf but i'm always paying attention to those details and figuring out what we can do to improve to have consistent results i'm careful to make sure that i distribute the flour evenly in the negative space especially in lettering where it's more important that you know it's legible whereas if some finer details are missed in an image it's not as big of a deal and then you just want to make sure that there's no excess flour sitting on top of the stencil as you peel it off it's pretty easy and i like to mix and match too had a little bit of a weed stock there and i'm noticing as it's snagging i'm going through a checklist in my head of what all the possible things may be i just switched to a fresh side of the razor so it's not that my razor is dull and i'm also noticing in my decorative scoring that it's not snagging so it's definitely an issue with either temp uh temperature tension something like that and i've got a cool one here with a proof peel and with this one i'll demonstrate kind of a non-traditional style of functional scoring man i just dumped a mountain of flour on there not ideal but we should still be able to make it work oh boy it's all about adapting as you go you know i do this all day four or five days a week but you know i'm not perfect at it either and i think that's something that people need to keep in mind you know i get a lot of remarks on instagram that people wish their scoring could turn out like mine but not all of my scoring looks like what i post on instagram there are hundreds of loaves that you don't see so this scoring i'm doing here is one that i use primarily on my big decorative lobes that are called center pieces and those are so for comparison these are 800 gram loaves and the centerpieces are 2 000 gram loaves and those are traditionally just like marketed as kind of like a dinner party loaf a gift for special events and i just kind of go all out and my decorative scoring on those and to maintain the decorative scoring without using an ear or without using an x scoring is you can implement something like this again i don't know if this is a real name for it but i call it framing so i have this like old framing here to kind of showcase the decoration on top and ideally what this will do is it allows the loaf to maintain the shape that i want um in you know it'll the scoring will actually work like um like an actual frame like artwork in a frame this part will lift up and be framed by this exposed dough that'll turn darker and it's just a nice really nice visual contrast and that's something that i've been playing around with and experimenting with as i've been going and since tuesdays are one of the lighter production day it's one of the days that i really you know if i have a lot of new ideas a lot of new things i want to experiment with i have a lot more time since it is a lighter production day to spend more time with each loaf and so i try to get my experimentation out at the beginning of the week so that by the time i'm on the weekend i've got whatever i want worked out so here is really the only time in the process where you get to assess what works and what doesn't the scoring for the main outline of the cactus and then you know the little striations that go through there is a bit thicker and wider than i would like but overall it's successful it doesn't really look like the scoring was competing too much with a decorative scoring the image of what it's supposed to be you know looks pretty clear to me i hope that what it's supposed to be comes across to other people and then i've got my saroro cactus here i like the striations the detail lines on the inside that design in particular for whatever reason took a long time for me to figure out while maintaining the ear that i wanted so maybe someone can help me out as to why this happens i've done some experimenting to try to replicate this um on purpose and i still can't ever really figure out why the ear splits open in two ways but you know overall it's successful it still generally maintains the shape that i want the decorative scoring came out really nicely and something that i try to remind myself because before i was making art on bread you know i was making all other kinds of visual art and see here's one where the ear wasn't successful and again that could be for any number of reasons the angle and it was on both of these and since these are two in a row it's likely that it looks like this is probably my fault i'm just assuming based off of you know i likely scored one after another i had the my you know the muscle memory and the angle of my hand and the angle of the lawn wrong for both of them and so if you're off just a little bit the results very you know a fair amount like just looking at the difference between these two and how successful and prominent this year here's here this here here is such a tongue twister compared to this one this one might also be because the scoring here is too deep and too close to the edge of the ear and so where i was talking about how the scoring can be competing for tension so overall i'm pretty pleased with how these are turning out over time i've gotten better at getting a more consistent year but it's also not all under my control i can only work with what's given to me and just try to adapt based off of how each loaf is behaving there's just a lot of intricacies that you can't really meaningfully teach to someone else because the the bread that we work with is you know so much different than the bread that you might be making at home when it comes down to the type of flour that we use the amount of protein in the flour um how much gluten is built up where we're mixing the dough how much tension we have our shaping methods all these things come into play and so it's really about knowing your bread and how it behaves because the tips i might be giving to any given person might not pertain to their dough my standards of what is acceptable is purely based on selfish reasons you know just kind of soft loose bread is not ideal for scoring you want a nice taut surface that makes a really beautiful canvas i mean the way that the bread is now it's softer i can tell by feeling it that there's not as much tension as the gases build up inside but it's gonna still make perfectly fine and acceptable bread i i just get a little cranky about it because then i don't necessarily get to do what i want as far as decorative scoring goes on a busy production day so say for a friday where i'm baking five times the amount of sourdough lows that i am today um i don't want to spend more than like 10 to 12 seconds scoring each loaf because the longer that any decks of the oven remain open um you know the longer it takes to get through all the bread and so on friday is really when i lean on the scoring designs that i practice the most so i jus i can just confidently crank them out one thing that's been really kind of frustrating but also nice in a way about using bread as an art form is that on the one hand the thing about it that i really enjoy but is also very frustrating is that i don't have as much control over what art gets to be exposed to the general public and what doesn't you know when i'm making art on anything else at home you know if it doesn't come out the way that i want it to i can just decide to scrap it start over and work on it until i come up with something i'm satisfied with i don't really have that option there or that option here when it comes to bread you know i'm not going to throw away a loaf of bread because you know it doesn't come out as pretty as i want to so it's kind of been a nice way for me to relax a bit when it comes to my own standards of what's good and what's acceptable and i try to remember i mean or at least i would imagine that most people aren't judging my scoring technique as harshly as i am so when i'm pulling bread out of the oven i'm always taking a second to kind of assess each loaf what was successful what was unsuccessful you know and like i mentioned before it's it's still a perfectly fine and great loaf of bread it's gonna taste just as good but i'm always finding ways to take note of how i can improve as an artist as a baker so i've decided to just shift over to the wheat stock because as i'm feeling the dough i'm kind of feeling it losing tension as the gas builds up inside and so i can tell based off of that any kind of decorative storing that i do outside of wheat stocks anything that has you know curves in it is likely to snag and the outcome is going to be less than desirable by my standards you know probably my own worst critic and they go good luck guys i believe in you

Channel: Proof Bread

Views: 232,043

Rating: 4.8643355 out of 5

Keywords: sourdough starter, sourdough bread, sourdough bakery, make bread, microbakery, local bakery, proof bread, proof bakery

Id: VCzPx74j44E

Length: 68min 43sec (4123 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020