3rd time's the charm honey oat porridge bread

I used the Honey Spelt Oat recipe from Sourdough by Sarah Owens. I followed her ingredients exactly, except I swapped out the spelt for whole wheat. The loaves in her book are a little small for my liking, but given my poor prior attempts with this recipe, I was happy to make less dough. 

I used slightly lower hydration than in prior attempts, but the main difference in process was not including oats in the autolyse. Something about doing a long autolyse that included the oat soaker just destroyed the gluten structure for me and turned the final dough into a stringy mess. I was also very nervous about over proofing the dough based on prior results, so I let the bulk go only 3 hours (versus 4 the day before). Glad I finally figured out (I think) the source of my porridge bread sorrows! If it tastes as good as it looks I'll definitely make this again (plus I have 9lbs of oats)! 

Next time I think I won't do an autolyse of flour + water and instead do a very short (20 min) autolyse with everything but the salt. I'll make this change because there wasn't enough water without the soaker so the autolyse created hard bits.