Home › White Bread › Bursting a Loaf Right

Bursting a Loaf Right

There are three ways of getting the loaf to burst properly. First, we have the ordinary way, in which the knife is held perpendicularly over the loaf, exactly as we hold a knife in cutting a strip of paper, for instance. Now, this makes the loaf burst all right, but the burst goes too deep into the loaf, so that when the loaf is sliced the middle cut, instead of being oval, resembles half a moon or a cut froma melon. Yet if you don't cut fairly deep, the loaf may not be depended on to burst always. To get the same breadth of burst without the depth another way of cutting is adopted, but this requires a little more skill than the first. The knife is held slanting at an angle of about 45 degrees, and the cut made from point to point that way: that is, the knife penetrates the skin of the loaf in a way as if the operator was making a cut preliminary to skinning the loaf. This cut is made slightly off the center, because when the loaf bursts one side lifts up and opens more than the other. But the great point of the whole affair is that a beautiful break of equal size with the other is got without the drawback of depth. In fact, in this way the burst seems to be confined to the outside layer of the loaf, and so it is we get good oval slices the whole way through. Bread to be treated in this way, however, must be properly fermented; underfermented dough often gives a blind loaf, i.e., the cut does not open. If there is a fair amount of moisture, however, in the oven the cut will always open-Bakers' Magazine.