A Costco Baker's Bread Scoring Speed Is Truly Something To Behold
Experienced bakers likely know all the best breadmaking hacks to ensure that their homemade loaves emerge from the oven looking dreamily soft and ready to be slathered in melty butter. Making your own bread from scratch is a complete labor of love, requiring a certain eye for detail and precision for it to turn out well. When it comes to scoring a doughy loaf before it hits the oven rack, there are plenty of bakers out there who have perfected this art of slow, careful carving. That's all well and good if you're baking in the comfort of your own home. However, when there are hungry customers to feed and empty shelves to restock, you've got to speed it up by a lot.
How much faster are we talking? There are no bread baking rules that say you can't score like the wind, and when you work at a busy grocery chain like Costco, efficiency and quality are key. That being said, Reddit may have found the Costco baker who takes the proverbial cake when it comes to lightning-fast scoring speed. He dubs his own quick bladework as "Zatoichi style" in the clip's title, referencing a fictional blind Japanese swordsman known for his awe-inspiring fighting skills. The scoring samurai of Costco may not be blind, but it's obvious that he's honed his craft and achieved a feat that some commenters are calling "pretty legendary."
32 French bread loaves were scored in 26 seconds
Papa Roach's banger of a song, "Cut My Life Into Pieces," not only fits the baker's Reddit video (which he also posted to TikTok) perfectly, it also syncs up with his rhythmic slicing pretty well, too. With four evenly proved loaves per pan, he promptly makes his way across the counter, methodically cutting two "x" shapes into each one until he reaches the end. Some viewers of the Costco subreddit post were puzzled by why you'd do this at all, and of course, the scoring samurai was there to explain: "It controls the expansion when it is baked. Without them the bread would expand in weak spots in the crust." In the baking world, this unattractive-looking homemade bread mistake is known as blowout.
@photokitchen13
Is the speedy Costco baker doing it right? Some comments say no, adding that his scores look "too deep" or "messy". To be fair, it looks like the man knows what he's doing, but he admits that while he is working quickly, that still doesn't guarantee a perfect bake every time. After all, this isn't some cute artisan bread shop — it's Costco. But if you want to get technical with it, the optimal bread scoring depth is ¼ inch while holding your knife or specialized lame razor at a 22 degree angle. How he manages to keep all that straight while his hands are flying that fast is a mystery — it might just be a superpower.