Cheap? Cheap? That’s the expensive option. I’ve been using a double edged razor blade (just like the one pictured) on a coffee stirrer stick (free from your favorite coffee shop) for many years. I daresay it works just as well.
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Also thinner and sharper. DE blades are surprisingly thin and insanely sharp compared to utility blades. Especially the good ones all the shaving nerds are into.
I just use the utility blade. Cause i don’t care, and none of this matters for soda bread. You make deeper, straight cuts on soda bread. And its a quick bread so it rises a lot different. So long as the cut is deep enough and clean, it doesn’t seem to matter.
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Is there some aspect of using the lame that I can’t replicate with a single-edged blade? I’ve already got scads of those in my kitchen to help keep the ceramic cook top clean. I’m looking for alternative uses after buying a box of 100 (years ago). Agreed that a sharp knife just doesn’t make it.
The utility blade doesn’t work that great on the sticky no-knead dough that I’ve been making. I’m going to get a pack of DE blades for a couple bucks and rig up my own lame and see if it make prettier cuts.
If I manage to cut myself putting it together I’ll post the details here!
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Lame cuts are handed. Curved cuts are apparently better for the rise, and the curved blade smears less than a straight one when making curved cuts. But that means you can only cut in the direction matching the curve of the blade. A double edged blade means you can flip it over and cut in the other direction. Supposedly the curve also makes for a more consistent cut depth, because you’re pressing a curved surface to a curved surface.
Its really just a consistency and control thing.
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I just use a single edge razor blade. You can get like 100 of them for 8 bucks.
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No uni-taskers in the kitchen. I have plenty of sharp blades that will do this job just as well, given the proper care and technique. And I don’t need something handed. I’ve got two of those. They both cut just fine.
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That’s exactly right, and it’s because the word (like so many other cooking terms) comes from French, where it is spelled lamé. That accent over the e indicates it should be pronounced like “ay,” while without the accent it would be silent just as it is in English. But English doesn’t use accented characters, yet it insists on taking words from every language it meets, hence the many exceptions to the rules in our lovely language.
You sure about that? As in, you’ve actually tried? Maybe it’s my technique, but after doing serious damage to several loaves that took two days to make by scoring with my sharpest, thinnest-bladed Japanese knife, I gave in and switched to a double-edged razor blade (which is all this is).
Added bonus: It’s not really a unitasker, I use double-edged razor blades to shave my face, too. They’re a hell of a lot cheaper than the zillion-blade cartridges that Gilette wants to sell you, and most lamés I’ve seen cost less than a Mach 3 razor handle.
Though I guess that second paragraph is moot if you don’t shave your face.
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The bend doesn’t help. You can also just stick one of these blades on a skewer you have sitting around already, or you can just use a single edge blade without a handle. It’s not rocket surgery.
Funny how professional bakers use a lame instead of some jerry-rigged system. Maybe they know something the average internet poster doesn’t?
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I bet they have their own forum, too.
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Now that’s just bound to escalate.
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I used to use single-edged before I switched to double-edged-onna-stick. I’m afraid I can’t break down the details of why, because I don’t know, but I find double-edged-onna-stick (a lame, that is) to work better. It’s so cheap that there’s no reason not to try it for yourself if you’re curious.
I don’t have my Larousse handy, but the expedient of Google Translate says English “blade” is French “lame”, without the acute accent. Pronounced to sound similar to “lamb”, not “lamb-ayy”. “Lamé” with the accent is shiny gold fabric and works very poorly for scoring dough (although come to think of it scoring dough is, colloquially, what fashion models are doing on the runway, so maybe you’ve got something there).
True enough for the most part (at least, nobody knows how to use them so it might as well be the same thing), but not every e in French has an aigu over it, it just seems that way. 
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” --James Nicoll
Maybe they bake a gazillion loaves a day and so the average Starbuck’s stirrer would break in no time so it’s worth it to them to have a dedicated gadget? I will say that I learned the double-edged-onna-stick trick from a professional baker. He was also the one who taught me not to waste my time obsessing over fancy salt or filtered or dechlorinated water.
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I have also done my duty to the cause by explaining to more than one newbie that all the current hype about getting each detail exactly right belies the fact that for something like 50,000 years, humans have managed to make bread without any modern equipment. Amazingly, even without digital thermometers and scales, bread can still be made…and has been, billions and billions of times.
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Here is a good primer on how to use a lame, and when and why the curved edge is so important:
https://blog.kingarthurflour.com/2017/08/04/scoring-bread-dough/
One thing about a purchased lame: they often have scoring or shaping that allows one to make the razor anything from basically straight to extremely curved, depending on what the baker wants to do.
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Jeez, I’ve owned a Breadtopia lame for a few years now, and I never noticed the handle design until you pointed it out. That’s really lame! (I am so sorry.)
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Or “A shiv” as we called them in the Penitentiary.
$8 – $10!?! Outrageous! Aliexpress will send you one from China for €0.83. Not including Trump tariffs, of course.
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