Heart of Wheat, from Rose's Bread Bible

Hello, everybody

a couple of weeks ago I made the 'Heart of Wheat" bread - she herself designed the recipe, based on everything she learned while baking a ton of bread for the book.

I had very high expectations for it, but unfortunately it did not work exactly as I hoped. It actually looked quite good, but the crumb was very tight and it had very little oven spring.

when the dough was ready to go in the oven, it was very very airy and bubly - which made me even more excited about getting THE perfect bread. I did what I normally do, "plopped" it out of the basket straight into my clay baker, but, contrary to my hearty sourdoughs (a la Hamelman). that barely deflate during the transfer, this bread pretty much turned into a flat sorry thing.

I was hoping it would have enough oven spring to come back to normal, but it rose very little.

for the experts bakers here - do you think that this particular kind of bread needs to be handled very gently? Would just the transfer affect so much the outcome?

If you want to see the series of photos, they are on my flickr site

http://www.flickr.com/photos/79167445@N00/sets/72157619698058718/

the series of photos shows the method, you make a sponge and then add flour and yeast on top of it, after a few hours the sponge sips through the flour, pretty cool method...

I add here a photo of the final loaf - as i said, looked good, but it was just so-so as far as taste and texture goes.

if anyone has made this particular recipe, I am all ears....

THANKS!