Somewhere down the road a piece from San Joaquin...
Summer has been interesting, bread-baking-wise. I went for a largely disastrous stretch trying to make higher-hydration, relatively slack doughs into bread because moisture seemed to be the key to wonderful artisan loaves. (You will note that none of those have been posted, and for good reason!) And the heat and humidity necessitated several changes to the way I feed and process my doughs, because we only use the air-conditioner as a last resort. It'll be nice when autumn really takes hold!
All that experimentation started with David Snyder's San Joaquin sourdough [1] (SJSD to many of us), and went a lot of wild places in the middle that didn't work so well, but I came out of it with another recipe that works for me—and a lot better at bread than I was beforehand!
What I have now is about 70.5% hydration, 17.5% white whole wheat (I got up to 20% in experimentation and my wife called "too much," so I backed off to here), and builds from a tiny amount of refrigerated starter with no excess, baking on the third day. I find it wonderfully sour, though that's not everyone's thing, and this is the first bread I've made that comes near my wife's wistful recollections of San Francisco.
It makes really nice boules, though I'm learning a finer balance between shaping and proofing to keep them from tearing open quite so hard. I've had several batard bakes before this split open in ways the slashes could barely control! Below are the good examples.
I've started to do the single slash down the middle because it gives us a loaf of reasonably uniform slice size, oblong without having to try to make an oblong loaf (which I definitely haven't mastered yet!). But so far, the angled slash that's supposed to give me nice grigne (post top) is providing half grigne, half blowout; the deep vertical slash (last, above) seems to control expansion better. These boules seem to turn out a bit denser in the middle than at the edges, so I've still got some fiddling to do with my handling and proofing, but it's getting better.