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Wanted to share this success. Like you all, I hate discarding so much starter, so I've been experimenting with uses - pancakes, english muffins etc. Got the English Muffins to where I'm happy - more batter-like than dough is the secret. Emboldened by English Muffin success, I wanted to experiment with some bread. I tried this formula:

2 days before baking:

Fed  25g of my 100% starter with 50g each KAP and water = 125 G.

Day before: saved 30g, and used 50g in a levain (discarded the rest).

Levain

50g starter

68g AP flour

12g Rye

100g water

Baking Day

Dough - about 68.5% hydration

650g KAP

480 water

All of the Levain (230g)

85G White Whole Wheat (KA)

45G Rye

20G Oat Bran (Bob's Red Mill)

10g salt

7 g flax seed meal (Bob's Red Mill)

Mix all but salt. Autolyse 90 minutes. Add in salt and knead 10-12 minutes by hand. 

Bulk ferment 2.5 hours with S&F at 50 minutes

Preshape; rest for 10 minutes, then shape.

Final Proof 90 minutes (my house was a cool 68F, while outside was about 20F)

Then, my usual baking regimen: 500F preheat with cast iron dutch oven/combo cooker; 20 minutes covered at 475F; 20 minutes uncovered (final 10 minutes with parchment paper removed).

This bread came out great! The flavor was really sublime - slightly nutty and sweet - I guess from the oat bran/flax seed meal combo. Not much sourdough tang at all, which was fine with me.  The crumb was a little too open, owing I think to not enough kneading/development. We demolished the first boule with some homemade minestrone and grilled cheese. 

There is nothing like authentic German Pretzel Rolls hot from the oven.  I made these to bring to a friend's house for Christmas Eve and everyone was raving about them all night.

The key to making these is that you must use Food Grade Lye better known as Sodium Hydroxide.  Don't let anyone tell you that you can skip this step by using baking soda.  If you want the real deal you must use Sodium Hydroxide or the crust will not be dark brown like it is supposed to.  You must be careful of course when using this product and where protective gloves and long sleeves and goggles.  Do not ever add the crystals to hot water or you will cause the water mixture to over flow and probably burn yourself in the process.

You can order Sodiuym Hydroxide on-line through Amazon and it will take about 4-5 days to ship since it is considered dangerous cargo.

I followed this recipe from German Foodie as posted on the The Fresh Loaf and it worked out great.

Another note, don't do what I did the first time and use parchment paper to line your cookie sheets.  I did this foolish thing and had to cut the paper off the bottom of most of the pretzel rolls.  Instead, use metal baking sheets and spray them heavily with cooking spray.  If they still stick you can simply use your dough scraper to loosen them from the baking sheet.

Make sure you have real pretzel salt as this will make a huge difference if you don't.

They came out just as good the second time around as the first.  Next time I will start experimenting a little and try some with cheese stuffed inside and I may try adding some rye flour into a batch to make Pumpernickel pretzels.

I made double the recipe which makes around 20 pretzel rolls.

Make sure after you mix the dough you use a big enough container to let the dough double in size while in the refrigerator.

    This was going to be bread for my wife's stuffing this weekend, but the impending snow storm has postponed our family dinner and the need for stuffing.  Not to mention she informed me she wanted a simple white bread and challah bread anyway, so I will be happy to eat this tasty cheesy, eggy bread all by myself.  No complaints here as this turned out excellent.  This bread tastes like cheese since I mixed both cheddar and Asiago cheese into the dough before it went for its overnight slumber in the fridge.  I think this method really distributes the cheese flavor throughout the entire bread.

I have to say the crust came out nice and chewy and the crumb was open and soft.  This bread is a keeper and is good enough to eat without any additional toppings.

I used my standard trusty AP starter at 65% hydration refreshed per below.

AP Starter

227 grams AP Flour

71 grams AP Seed Starter

151 grams Water at Room Temperature (80-90 degrees F.)

Mix ingredients in a bowl until thoroughly combined.  Cover the bowl and let it sit at room temperature for around 8 hours.  The starter should almost double when ready to proceed.  You can either mix in final dough or put in refrigerator for at most 1 day before using.

Main Dough Ingredients

425 grams AP Starter from above

130 grams First Clear Flour

290 grams European Style Flour (KAF--you can substitute AP or Bread Flour)

100 grams Durum Flour

25 grams Potato Flour

80 grams Grated Cheddar Cheese

40 grams Grated Asiago Cheese

142 grams Whole Egg Beaten (3 large eggs)

262 grams Water at Room Temperature

15  grams Olive Oil

18 grams Seas Salt or Table Salt

Directions

Mix the flours, oil, water (hold back 50 grams for later) and eggs in your mixer or by hand for 1 minute. Let it rest covered in your bowl for 10 minutes.   Next cut the starter into small pieces and put into the bowl on top of the dough and let it rest another 10 minutes covered.  After the autolyse is complete add the salt and the rest of the water as needed and mix for 3 minutes on low to incorporate all the ingredients.  The dough should form a sticky ball at the end of 3 minutes mixing.  Now add the cheese and mix for 1 additional minute to incorporate all of the cheese throughout the dough.  the dough will be rather sticky but resist the urge to add more flour.

Next take the dough out of the bowl and place it a well oiled bowl.  Do several stretch and folds in the bowl and rest the dough uncovered for 10 minutes.  After the rest do several more stretch and folds in the bowl and cover the bowl and let it rest for 10 minutes.  Do one more stretch and fold and let it sit at room temperature covered for 2 hours.  Feel free to do some additional S&F''s to build up more gluten strength.  After 2 hours you can put the dough into the refrigerator for 24 hours or up to 2 days before baking.  I baked the bread about 14 hours later.

The next day (or when ready to bake) let the dough sit out at room temperature for 1.5 - 2  hours.

Next, form the dough into your desired shape and put it in a floured basket  or bowl and let it rise covered for 1.5 to 2 hours or until it passes the poke test.

Score the loaves as desired and prepare your oven for baking with steam.

Set your oven for 500 degrees F. at least 30 minutes before ready to bake.  When ready to bake place the loaves into your on  your oven stone with steam and lower the temperature immediately to 450 degrees.    When the loaf is golden brown and reached an internal temperature of 205 degrees F. you can remove it from the oven.

Let it cool on a wire rack for at least 2 hours before digging in if you can wait that long.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM CLEO, COSMO, LUCY, MISTY AND MOOKIE!

Timing is everything.

Good timing makes a joke work, as bad timing does the same for tragedy.

For bread, though, it means nothing.  Bakers who brag about using long fermentation times puzzle me.  I mean, I know what they mean, but do they?  I, too, am guilty of using this idea when discussing bread.  Why?  It's convenient.  Everybody knows it.  It's an available reference point.

And yet it all means nothing.

Handmade things that take a long time to make are usually thought of as being of a higher quality than a similar product made fast and cheaply on an industrial scale.  Why?  The answer to this question will help us a bit further on.

First, let's talk about time.  What is it?  For our purposes, it's the same thing as dough rheology, the progression from one physical state of being into another, with the possibility of never returning to the previous state.  The tricky thing to pin down, though, is the rate of change, which is consequently affected by the hows and whys of the physical transformation attempting to be measured.

For us, as bakers, time is merely a very long string connecting together a series of snapshots of a dough's state of being.  And, no, I am not about to get Heideggerian.  For me, this offers a better framework by which to understand time.

Some bakers view time as an ingredient.  This is silly.  It is okay to have one cup of thyme, but not one cup of time.  Others, still, insist it is a procedural parameter, which it certainly is.  In a real-world environment, we all have busy lives.  There are only so many hours in the day, and this might dictate our baking schedule.  It is much easier to control time when it is viewed as an outcome, and not as an independent variable.

Fermentation is the change in the physical state of being from a dough and into bread.  There are simply so many controllable variables available to a diligent baker that she might be able to make two loaves of bread, both with nearly identical results, but with vastly different times it took to achieve that end result.  This tells us that time is irrelevant to understanding fermentation.

So, how to we better measure the physical state of our would-be bread?  What tools are available to us to better understand and measure the rate of metabolic activity, the degradation of the dough?  There are many methods already available to the baker (e.g., measuring pH, CO2 production, and so on).  What other data points can we find to build a better, more robust model?

And why does taking a long time by hand necessarily make something better?  Because:  there's simply more time to interact with the substance to be measured, and thus more available data points for an astute baker to collect (with or without her consciously knowing).  Good bread is not about time; it's about doing the right thing at the right time.  It is in our, the baker's, interaction, when and how we handle the dough, from which good bread emerges.

So, let's take our time and find more reference points.  Answer why and we discover how and when.