3-Way Oat Sourdough

This bread was so good, I thought it was worthy of creating my first blog!  The original recipe came from Rose Levy Berenbaum's site, here; she cites original recipe from Chef Andrew Meltzer.  The version she posts is a yeasted loaf and was spectacularly good.  I made it as she posted and below is the result.  The dough contains an oat porridge, toasted oats, and the loaves are rolled in oats before baking.  I was obviously a little more successful in rolling one versus the other below! ;-)

I wanted to see if I could sourdough-ify it, and 'for fun' (?) put it in a loaf pan for some more uniform slices for our morning toast.  The sourdough methodology that has been working for me is based on the Tartine method.  As I get more comfortable with sourdough, I see how flexible it is and adaptable to one's schedule.  I finally pulled off a salt rising bread earlier this year, and that process was not all that forgiving!  Maybe once you get it down, but, whew, took lots of tries to get that one off the ground.

So back to yummy oat sourdough- I set up a levain the night before, then in the morning, made the porridge and toasted oats, and proceeded with the rest of the final dough ingredients.  I backed off on the honey and salt from Rose's original recipe.  The dough fermented about 3- 3.5 hours, and proofed for 1.5 hours before baking it off.   The resulting loaf has a nicer chew to it than the yeast version, and just a subtly nicer flavor, in our opinion.  The crust is really nice in these loaves, so for the last bake, I baked the loaves for about 20 minutes, removed them from the loaf pans, and put the loaves back in the oven 'free-form' on my baking stone.  That got the crusts all the way around nice and toasty.

Toast a piece of this with your morning coffee or tea, and life is very good!  

Here's what I did (quantity also upped slightly from Rose's post):

Levain for night before:

30 g whole wheat flour

30 g bread flour

60 water

2- 3 tsp 100% hydration starter

Next morning, with levain all nice and puffy:

275 g H2O

all of levain

45 g honey

Oat Porridge (81 g oats boiled in 307 g H2O until thick, then cooled)

Toasted Oats (122 g oats toasted in a dry skillet, tossing often until lightly browned, cooled)

38 g whole wheat flour

471 g bread flour

Autloyze 30 minutes

add 18 g salt and 20 g water

Ferment 3- 4 hours.  Dough is *very* sticky.  Divide in 2 balls and let rest 30 minutes.  Shape loaves.  Roll loaf on wet paper towels, then roll in oats spread on a cookie sheet.  Place loaves in sprayed pan (or in banneton) to proof- about 1.5 hours for me.

Bake 400F.  The loaf pan version took about 40 minutes.  As mentioned above, I removed them from the pans about 20 minutes in to toast up the crust all around.  :-)