Why I Became Obsessed With Scoring My Bread

Okay so when I first started baking sourdough, I honestly didn't get why scoring mattered that much. Like, you shape your dough, you throw it in the Dutch oven, and boom – you're done, right? Wrong. So now I'm basically that kid who gets weirdly excited about making the perfect slash on top of my loaves, and I'm not even sorry about it.

Here's the thing – scoring is basically telling your bread where it's allowed to expand. When you put your dough in the oven, it's going to rise up and do this awesome thing called oven spring where it puffs up one last time from the heat. But if you don't score it, the crust just kind of holds it back and you end up with a weird lumpy loaf instead of a beautiful round one. With a good score, you're creating a weak spot where the dough knows it should burst open, and then you get this gorgeous ear – that's the flap that sticks up on the side. It looks so cool and it means your bake went right.

My mom helped me figure out the technical stuff, but honestly my dad was the one who made me realize that scoring is also kind of an art thing. He was like "Easton, you spent all week keeping Yeaston happy and building structure through your bulk fermentation and stretch-and-folds – now you get to make it look amazing." And he was totally right. After you shape your dough and let it do its final proof, the scoring is your signature. Some of my regulars who buy from Rise & Grind literally ask me what pattern I'm doing that week.

I use a bread lame, which is just a fancy razor blade on a stick, and I go for either a classic diagonal slash or sometimes I'll do crossed scores if I'm feeling fancy. The key is being confident and going deep – like a quarter inch into the dough. If you're timid about it, the score kind of disappears during the bake and you don't get that crispy ear you're after.

Living in Vegas, my fermentation times are already shorter because of the heat, so I'm usually scoring my dough the morning before I bake. By the time it goes into the Dutch oven, it's perfectly proofed and ready to show off. The score is the last step before the magic happens, and honestly it's become my favorite part. Well, tied with eating the bread obviously.