Every couple weeks or so, we send out a little roundup of new recipes, techniques, and tutorials that we’ve recently posted on the site. Occasionally we announce exclusive giveaways to newsletter subscribers as well. We won’t spam you with ads or share or sell your email address. Every email we send has a 1-click unsubscribe link if you decide it’s not for you.
Experiment: Scoring Dough Once versus Twice
For a few years now, I’ve seen some bakers on Instagram score their dough twice: just before putting the dough in the oven as is customary and again 5-7 minutes into the bake, cutting the same line a second time. This is after the initial steaming period but before the crust hardens too much for the blade to slide through. The lid is off for less than a minute before the baking continues. This re-scoring of the dough is meant to encourage more opening or “bloom” of the score by re-creating a zone of weakness for the dough to push through. The goal is usually to protect smaller, detailed cuts from tearing and to encourage a larger and airier loaf — in theory.
I designed this experiment to see the impact of scoring once versus twice on score bloom, bread shape, and the crumb of two identical doughs. To make the experiment more fun, the two doughs are a swirled combination of a plain dough and a blue butterfly pea flower dough. [Here is the recipe if you want to try it ➡ Butterfly Pea Flower Swirl Sourdough Bread.] I combined and layered the white and blue doughs after the bulk fermentation. The loaves were shaped, proofed, and baked under identical conditions, except for re-scoring one of the doughs (always on the left). The blade was at a 30-45° angle for all of the scoring.
Scored twice: slightly more open center area
The first five minutes of a bake are usually considered the most important for steam. I removed the lid on the “scored once” dough to ensure it had the same conditions as the “scored twice” dough, but I probably should have left the lid on to showcase the typical process. I’m fairly certain, however, that this venting of steam didn’t have much impact. Moreover, the “scored once” dough was the first dough I loaded into the oven, so when the lids came off it had baked about two minutes longer than the “scored twice” dough.
Scored twice: flatter and wider
Results
Re-scoring the dough yielded a wider, flatter loaf with perhaps a slighly more open crumb. This loaf also had more slice size consistency from end to end. The customary approach to scoring, once just before baking, resulted in a a taller, narrower bread with more tapering of slices toward the ends of the loaf.
As noted the crumb difference was barely significant, so unless you have a very detailed score you’re trying to protect with a reinforced large cut, the decision to add this extra step of scoring at the 5-7 minute mark is a matter of preference for bread shape and process complexity.
Experiment: Scoring Dough Once versus Twice