Whole wheat flour sourdough

but to me a polish is made with a little bit of commercial yeast and on the more liquid side that is allowed to ferment for 12 to 24 hours depending on how much flour water and yeast used.  Using a SD starter you are making a levain - not a poolish.  Also an autolyse is usually flour and water - no salt, no yeast and or no SD levain.  It is just letting the flour soak up the water and sit there for extended periods of timeto soften the bran so the gluten can form better without being cut.

You are making a 65% hydration 100% course home ground whole wheat wheat bread.  This requires a long autolyse 4- 8 hours is about right and much more liquid.  If you want rise and holes you are going to want to mill the flour finer by milling it more than once, make sure the gluten is well deveoped and get the hydration up to around 78-80 % and autolyse longer.  This should help your crumb a lot make sure that the dough doubles during ferment and nearly so, say 85-90% for final proof.  This should give you a very nice loaf of whole grain bread.

Keep at it and your bread will get better.

Happy baking

We use a Wolfgang Mock (KoMo) grain mill every day for many purposes (bread, pasta, tortillas, desserts) and it produces a fine flour. For most uses we sieve out the bran, with a flour yield (extraction rate) of 82% to 85%. The bran doesn't taste that good, and in bread applications it slices up the gluten while kneading. We went through several inadequate mills before buying this grain mill. An adequate grain mill is essential.

Freshly ground flour is "green" (not aged) and is notorious for gluten problems. A standard fix is to add an infinitesimal amount of ascorbic acid: 40 parts per million. As Suas coaches, one can do this by mixing very carefully a 1:20 blend of ascorbic acid to flour, then using this to mix very carefully a 1:400 blend of ascorbic acid to flour (sift and stir seven times, like you were shuffling cards). Then 10 grams or so in each of my loaves makes a huge difference. While I'd love to be a "flour, water, yeast, salt" purist, I'm not willing to give up freshly ground flour for the supermarket stuff that tastes like unbleached paper towels. Something has to give. Plenty of hippy types take ascorbic acid pills (vitamin C) and after seeing the effect of 400 ppm on dough, I'll never take the accepted dose as a vitamin again. The effect is striking.

Conventional whole wheat recipes might only include 30% whole wheat. Consider yourself lucky for now if you can manage 60% whole wheat; there are worse evils than white flour.

Use a spreadsheet. Unless you're adding walnuts or cocoa powder, there's no such thing as distinct bread recipes. Bread is a continuum. What works for me in the 60% whole wheat range is 45% red winter wheat, 15% rye (both freshly ground and sieved) and 40% white flour. 72% hydration, 15% leaven, 2% salt, 40 ppm ascorbic acid, 0.5% diastatic malt, 1/4 tsp yeast per loaf. I autolyse the whole flour with most of the white, the 1:400 AA, diastatic malt, and water. Meanwhile I mix the yeast and some white with the starter to make a similar consistency levain. An hour later I mix the two together with salt, wet knead on a board (a bench knife helps here), then bulk ferment three hours or so at 70 F, folding every 45 minutes as many folds as the dough will allow. I shape the loaves, rise two hours in linen couche canvas. Meanwhile, I set the fire in my yard oven (Komodo Kamado) or later, preheat my indoor oven. Either way, I use Bouchon Bakery's recommendation for 350 grams of steam, which takes some serious thermal mass to generate, such as several rolls of stainless steel chain in a large cast iron skillet. If one uses a plant spritzer on the oven walls, weigh it before and after as a reality check. Water expands 1600x to steam, and one's goal is to displace several times the volume of the oven.

2brownbaydogs,  first,  love the dogs.  Second, I can't offer too moch help.  Nearly everything I make is 100 percent wheat, all home ground.  Unfortunately, I have not had much luck with sourdough, but did make a few loaves of pain au levian recently thet came out well. My method was to make the recipe first with 100% regular bread flour.  After i did that, i tried 100% home ground wheat flour - which was a disaster.  But then I made another loaf of the bread flour version and noticed the differences in how it felt at various steps, then did another loaf of 100% whole wheat and it came out much better.  I ended up adding more water, and doing more kneading with the wheat.  So my suggestion is to try your recipe with while flour, then switch to wheat, and go back and forth until you can get a similar amount of rise ( it will always be somewhat less with whole wheat ) .  I have decided I need to use that process to make the conversion.  Others suggest you make it 100% white, then in later attempts, increase the wheat percentage, and that would probably work as well.  I usually try one silce of the white loaves, then give away the rest.