Bordelaise Bread Scoring Lame with Protective Cover, and One Blade Included, by Mure & Peyrot

I only bake boules so this review will only apply to my experience. This is a wonderful lame. It has the best safety to utility ratio of any I have seen. And it's my go to lame for scoring my boules. It curves the blade just enough to do both shallow and deep cuts. Some here have said that it won't cut deep enough. It will cut as deep as any lame i have seen that uses replaceable double edged blades. Cuts should range in depth from 1/4" to 1/2". For very deep cuts this lame can go quite deep, but you may get deeper results from a very sharp thin-bladed knife. (You can get bulk double edged blades online from Israel that are so cheap that you can use a new one every time if you want, but that won't be necessary.) There are online tutorials for how to score bread. In general keep the blade vertical for deep cuts and more horizontal for shallow cuts when you want ears. One precaution: if the plastic end piece has a rough edge, trim it down so it won't tear your loaf.

The lame does its job...if you just want to cut a slice straight down the middle. The safety of blade at the end is what ruins it. There is a cover that runs along the center of it and clips together at the end of the blade. Not enough of the razor shows so you have to do multiple cuts to get deep. Also forget about making an ear on your bread. That center cover ruins that too. the blade is not curved so its pretty terrible at getting the right angle needed to make the cut. All in all it is good for just normal slices. But for the price you would probably be better just making one from a Popsicle stick (directions are on line.)

This was the first real lame I bought. I used to just use a stiff razor to score my breads but this certainly makes it easier. The blades are stainless steel so they don't corrode, the handle has a nice textured grip, and the cover is very convenient and well-designed. This lame works well straight or curved. It took me a while to figure out how to make the blade curved. I thought you could do it by sliding part of the handle, but instead, you just bend the metal piece under the blade that keeps it stiff. The sliding part is just for releasing the blade. The lame doesn't come with instructions so I only figured this out when I found a product video for it online. The metal piece can be bent into a curve or kept straight if you want a straight lame. Either way, it does a great job and makes scoring easy.

I bought this lame despite the mixed reviews. I'm glad I bought it though. It works great for me. Even though I use a very wet recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day , I have no trouble scoring the loaves and haven't had a bad experience with the dough puckering. Use a light, but firm grip and then don't hesitate. Also, I've had my best luck when I hold the handle closer to the surface of the loaf to minimize the angle of the cut. When I held the handle higher and used a larger angle, the pointed corner of the blade just kind of tore though the dough. Using more of the edge did a great job of slicing through the dough to score the loaf. Remember as the blade starts to get dull, that you have four cutting surfaces. Use the top edge and/or the bottom edge until they become dull, and then remove the blade and flip it around to use the edges that were closer to the handle. Also remember to wash and DRY the blade after every use. Drying a razor blade extends its life.

This lame is better than nothing. It will score a loaf of bread cleanly and easily if held at EXACTLY the optimum angle. However, the design limits the depth of the cut at a little over one-eighth of an inch no matter how you hold it, which is far too shallow to create a "handle" (in which one side of the cut forms a wing-like flap that is deep enough to use like a handle to pick up the loaf). If you try to cut any deeper, the plastic part that holds the blade drags against the dough, and the result is a hideous, jagged, shredded gouge in the dough. Almost surely, ALL of the bad reviews that say this item isn't sharp enough (a double-edged razor blade - which this and practically all lames use - is the sharpest edge most of us will ever encounter anywhere, sharp enough to slice off a fingertip before you even know what happened) are actually complaining because they tried to cut deeper than this is designed to go - so that, although the razor blade did slice the dough neatly, the plastic came along behind it and pulled the sharp slice into a jagged gash. I did the same thing many times before I figured out what the real problem was. Unfortunately, a 1/8" deep cut just isn't deep enough. After much searching, I did find a lame that is nearly perfect, but it is made by hand by serious amateur bakers in the Netherlands and is available only directly from them. They're known as the Weekend Bakery and they're a MARVELOUS resource for all things related to breadmaking. Just Google the name, or join the two words into one and put a dot com after it, then look in their Webshop for the lame. They're a couple named Marieke and Ed (Ed makes the lames), and they are extremely friendly, knowledgeable, and eager to help, and they read and write English as well as I do. Their fantastic and gorgeous website is in both Dutch and English. Including shipping to the US, their lame costs less than this one does (9.45 euro total, which is a little over twelve dollars). It is made of wood and is infinitely more versatile than this item is, with a replaceable blade and an infinitely adjustable blade mounting position. You can slice as far as an inch or more into the dough if you want to, and there's nothing to make it seem like the incredibly sharp blade is dull when it's really the plastic holder making the mess. It's such a simple tool that I'm amazed it's not manufactured somewhere in volume, but if it is, it's a very well kept secret. For now, the wonderful folks at the Weekend Bakery are the only place I know of where you can get anything like it.

Not a very good lame. Maybe I am using it wrong but I followed the advice I found from another reviewer (might have been a review of another lame) and used a split popsicle stick (fresh out of a box of 1000 - not a "used" one, yuuch) and inserted it through the large hole of a double edge blade. That technique worked (and works) great. Puts good tension on the cutting edge and helps to prevent any pulling on the dough which will create wrinkles in the dough. Not very pleasing! I also tried replacing the blade, not very easy, to see if maybe the one that came in the lame was defective - same result. Save the small pittance for this product and buy a case of popsicle sticks along with a case of the double edge blades. I have started doing this with the last batch of loaves and attained nice clean cuts - NO WRINKLES!!

I was worried that this might be a bit beyond me, but right from first try on some french sticks, perfect. Just follow the instructions on the angle to hold the blade at and it does all the work for you.

I usually bake about 20 loaves of bread at a time, scoring the loaves has to be fast, and this thing does not cut as easily as my serrated knife. If you need to make a deep cut the tip of the blade will tear the dough, at least it did for me. I went back to my serrated knife which works very well.