So, you are getting into sourdough baking. You’ve been nursing your dough, stretching and folding it carefully, watching it grow light and bubbly, shaping it, putting it into bannetons, and sticking it in the fridge. It’s time to bake. You take it out and put it onto some parchment paper to score it. You freeze. You have no idea how to do it. It’s time to read my sourdough bread scoring tutorial.

Scoring bread is like a baker’s signature. It gives your bread a significant look that people will recognize. Scoring also helps your bread expand and gives you amazing oven spring and a lighter crumb, at least with some scores. It really depends on what you are going for.

Or how I learned how to bake artisan sourdough bread. Sourdough bread is the new black. Everybody wants to eat it and, more than that, bake it. Getting started can be difficult: making the starter, different techniques that go into making and baking the bread, and in the end, all you get is a flat piece of bread. What gives? These are my secrets to getting great oven spring in your sourdough bread.

I started baking sourdough bread a while back. I knew nothing about it, but I had a month at home recovering after surgery. The first struggle was to make the starter. It was winter, so my kitchen was rather cold, and I didn’t know what effect it would have on making a starter.