Hi Eric & Breadtopia Friends,
I’ve been wanting to make this loaf for a while now and finally did. I followed the directions carefully and it came out wonderfully. Here are some photos. I wished the crumb would’ve been a bit more open, but these whole grain loaves are harder to achieve that, at least for me. Here are some photos. Thanks for the wonderful recipe!
Best,
Ray in Houston
I just finished making my first (double) batch of sourdough from scratch - It took me a bit more than a week to make the starter; then, I followed the video exactly - I watched it over and over again…LOL - as best I could - but I didn’t have a “cloche”. So I set my oven to “steam bake” - filled the water tray in the oven (designed for steam baking), and then I put two loaves snuggled together in my fancy Turkey roasting pan - it’s the only oven proof object I had with a thick bottom and that is meant to heat up at the same time as the oven. I also used the thermometer that works with the oven to make sure the loaves came up to at least 205 deg F. It worked!! So yummy - thank you for the easy to follow videos and recipe. Retirement works too! 
Excellent! Congratulations on your starter and your beautiful breads.
I remember for my early double bread batches, I would use my enormous 9qt Dutch oven for one dough and the glazed ceramic inner pot of my slow cooker with aluminum foil as the lid for the other dough. Honestly the two breads would come out looking pretty much the same 
I’d love to use this recipe for a sandwich loaf vs a round rustic boule. Do I need to make any changes to the recipe or the baking to make that work?
Here’s an FAQ that describes changes you can make to the baking time and temp:
As for the recipe, I suspect the dough will be too big for most loaf pans. If you have the dimensions of your pan, I can help you figure out how much to scale the recipe down to fit it.
Hi Melissa, and thanks for responding. I love the flavor and texture of this recipe. I have standard 9"x5"x2-3/4" bread pans. Was thinking of simply cutting the ready-to-bake dough in half and splitting between two pans. But any thoughts you have on either adjusting the recipe or baking times would be most appreciated.
I agree this recipe has a wonderful flavor and texture.
1348g is what I get when I add up all the ingredients. That would be 674g per pan, which seems too small to me.
For example, this recipe which is made in that same loaf pan, has 1026g dough.
If you want 1 loaf, I think you should aim for 1000g dough.
1348/1000=0.74
You can multiply all of the recipe’s ingredients by 0.74 and you’ll have a 1000g dough
If you want two loaves, multiply the recipe ingredients by 1.48 (0.74x2).
Checking my work:
1.48 x 1348 = 1995g
close enough to 2000g
You can follow the baking time and temp of that vegan spelt bread
Thank you for this recipe. I made it yesterday and am very happy with the results. However, I fed my starter with our home grown whole wheat (which seems heavy on bran) and my starter was very light and foamy but dry when finished. I tried making it with your exact measurements but had to add another 1/2 cup water, a little at a time, to be able to incorporate all the flours. Do you think the bran soaked up too much of the water? Does white whole wheat typically have less bran? I milled all the grains from whole rye, wheat and Spelt. Should I have tried to sift out some of the bran?
Love this recipe, so delicious, two things I’ve always wondered about:
Why include the starter in initial soak rather than plain water
Why soak only the wholemeal first
I think the “evening day 1” step is building a large levain so that the day 2 step happens with that specific timing. It does also have the autolyse benefit of softening the bran of that portion of the wheat flour. The gluten of the flour in a levain/starter is usually a bit compromised, so “saving” the bread flour for later / not putting it into the day 1 levain build kind of makes sense. You could use some of the rye in this levain build if you wanted–keep in might that might make the levain mature a bit faster.
