Rescues · TO SCORE
The blade drags and tears wet dough.
Why it happens
Not sharp enough, or too slow. A razor or a very sharp thin blade, one confident stroke.
Recovering it
A loaf that burst in the wrong place bakes perfectly well and simply looks wrong — score deeper next time, and check the proof. Meat cut into cannot be undone; serve it with the resting juices poured back. If the fat has not rendered, more time at higher heat usually still gets there, since the cuts are already in place.
The mechanism
Scoring is nearly always about controlling something that is going to happen anyway. Skin and fat contract when heated and will tear somewhere; scoring decides where, and opens channels for rendered fat to escape rather than pooling under the skin. Bread does the same thing under gas pressure — a loaf expands violently in the first minutes of baking and will burst at its weakest point, so a deliberate cut gives the expansion somewhere to go and the loaf keeps its shape instead of splitting along its side. On squid and kidneys, scoring shortens the muscle bundles so the piece curls rather than toughens. And on anything being marinated, shallow cuts increase surface area, though only marginally — a marinade still penetrates a few millimetres at most, and scoring does not change that fact as much as recipes imply.
The full TO SCORE lesson — how to tell, where to practise it, what it carries to.