This recipe is adapted from a few sources. The ingredient list and the starter came from the "Rustic Bread" recipe in a Cooks Illustrated book (The Best Recipe). If you've never made a bread like this, start with that recipe. It's super simple and a great bread.

The method is really from a bunch of time I spent with the Le Brea cookbook. Especially the timing around fermenting/proofing.

Hydration and flour types manipulation was based on some reading I did in Levy's Bread Bible and in Scott/Wing's Bread Builders.

Finally, the recipe really took shape, as yours should too, by making and remaking and thinking about what you want your bread to look/taste/feel like when it's done.

Our goal was to make a multi-purpose, do-everything bread that we could bake by sort of working into the background of our daily tasks. The bread had to store well for long bike trips (must do ok for 3-4 days); it had to have more than 50% whole wheat; Liza really wanted it to have an accessible crust with a nice chew. We didn't want to have to haul out the electric mixer every day -- it had to be easy to make.

We made 3 loaves a day for about a month until we hit a reproducible and good bread. It also took a couple weeks just to build the flavor in the starter. Then we fussed with some particulars to get more wheat into it and now we're calling it done.

Ingredients

Part of making the bread less fussy to make was to convert all measurments from weight to volume. I'll add weight at some point if folks want that.

Here's the basic ingredient list.

Starter

• 1 cup bread flour
• 1 cup high protein whole wheat
• 1 TB gluten
• 1/8 tsp yeast
• 1 cup water
• 1 fist-sized glob of fermented dough -- if this is the first starter you're making, then you won't have this dough. Increase yeast to 1/4 tsp.

Dough

• 1.5 cups bread flour
• 2 cups high protein whole wheat
• 1/2 cup dark rye
• 1 TB gluten
• scant 1/4 tsp yeast
• 2 TB honey
• 1 1/3 cup water
• 2 tsp table salt

Some notes on ingredients.
In all cases we use organic stuff. We use distilled or purified water. We do this mainly to keep control of as many variables as we can.
Bread flour is just all purpose flour with a bit more protein.
The high protein whole wheat flour we use is Giusto's, "organic Hi-protein Fine Whole Wheat". It has about 13% protein.
The gluten is to help the structure of the bread since there's so much whole wheat. We use Bob's Red Mill.
We use "Saf-Instant" yeast. Good stuff. Don't use "Rapid Rise." You want it to take time.

Method

One huge component of breads that we like to eat is flavor. Most breads lack flavor. Flavor is created in part by the interaction of ingredients (flavor of whole wheat, honey, salt), but also by bacteria that is the by-product of the yeast activity. The bacteria takes time to develop and if developed incorrectly, you get funk, which is no good. So, the main part of this bread is not to rush it. It takes time. Note the small amount of yeast you're putting in. All up, when the starter is mature, you're looking at just over a 1/4 tsp of yeast per batch. That's because you are favoring time instead of yeast to develop the bread. Both are necessary though.

Mix the starter

Dump all the starter ingredients into a bowl and mix.

If you plan on making bread w/in 8 hours, then cover the glob and leave it on your counter. If you are making the bread the next day, then cover it and put it in the refrigerator. Under no circumstances are you to mix the bread in under 8 hours.

Mix the Dough

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Be sure the starter is at room temp. If it's been in the refrigerator, let it sit out for an hour or two to come up to temp. If the starter is new, it will look pretty lifeless. After a couple months of making this bread it will show some life after you take it out and let it rest on the counter. You'll see lots of small bubbles on the underside (always put your dough in glass or plastic that you can see through. Then you know what it's doing under the covers). In some cases, you might see a big old slow bubble rising off the surface. You know it's time to mix when you see that.

Anyway, mix the dough in this way:

• In a large bowl, stir together the bread flour, whole wheat, rye flour, gluten, and yeast -- all the dry stuff (but not the salt!)
• dump in the starter and honey and the water (but not the salt!) and mix it as good as you can with a short and stout wooden spoon
• mix until the dough is homogenous. By hand, this means dumping it on the counter and kneading, smacking, and throwing it down with a dough scraper in one hand and one gooey hand (about 5 minutes). Or, if you have a mixer, putting the dough hook in and mixing on low-medium until it's all mixed and uniform (about 3 minutes).
  Whatever you do, don't add flour! Read that again if you need to. You can add water, but not flour. In fact, if you have a mixer, you could add up to 1/3 of a cup more water if you like chewier/holier/more artisan-y bread. You can add that too if you are mixing by hand, it's just more of a chore to mix.
• I usually mix a new starter at this point too. In the section "The Ferment," you will have to decide what you are going to do with the dough, either set it on the counter or in the refrigerator. What you do for the dough: do it for the starter. You want the starter kind of working a bit by the time you get to "The Proof," which is where you add the dough to this starter. Make sense? If not, it will when you get to "The Proof." Just make the starter (yes, again) for now. So, you'll have a gob of dough that you just put starter into, and a fresh starter going.

The 20 minute pause -- autolyse

This is critical. Don't skip it. I've read this is about letting the water distribute evenly and be absorbed by the flour. I don't know. But I do know this: if you skip this, the dough is always too slack and never stretchy enough; the bread is not as chewy-interesting. It's also much easier to knead (by hand especially) when the dough has rested. Plus, 20 minutes is just enough time to do a quick clean up of the mess so far and go tend to one minor thing in your life... maybe write a check, or check email, or make a call or something. So, cover the glob of dough with a dry towel and let it rest for 20 minutes.

The Knead

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We're down to about 6 minutes of kneading by hand. We started at 20 minutes. There's a lot of ink about how to knead until the dough passes the "window-pane" test or how at 70-something degrees it's just right, but at 70-something +1, it's dead. And just recently, some guy at the NYT wrote an article about how you don't need to knead at all! We found 6 minutes was the as little as we can get away with and I usually go for about 8 just for good measure.
So, add your salt and knead for a minimum of 6 minutes (if by hand). It's critical to knead well so that the salt is distributed throughout the bread. In one of our earlier batches we were experimenting with pushing the salt all the way until the last minute or two of kneading. This resulted in some slices of bread that were cardboard tasteless and others that were super hits of salt. We just were not getting the salt worked fully into the dough.

The Ferment

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This is where a lot of flavor happens. The idea here is to double the volume of the dough. You can do this on the counter, over the course of 8 hours or so, or you can throw it in the fridge and see what it looks like in 20 hours. Either way, give it the time it needs to grow. Don't rush it. Don't set it on the oven or in a warm spot. Just let it do its thing. If you miss the boat and it's doubled + some. Then punch it down, give it a quick knead and double it again. Double it. Got it?

The Proof

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Proofing is where you shape the dough and let it go through its final rise. Before you shape or anything, you need to punch down the dough and let it rest for a few minutes.

Get your poolish/chef glob for the starter

Punch it down. After 5 minutes or so, get your bench scraper and lob off a hunk of dough about the size of a medium fist. This goes into your starter for the next batch. I keep mine in plastic food container that is stackable in the refrigerator. Just mix it in with your wooden spoon. It doesn't have to be super mixed, but since the starter is pretty tacky, it's easy to work in the dough.

Shape

There are lots of books and websites that will show you how to properly shape dough for different loaf styles. I'm not there yet. We just lob it off and try to make a nice, sealed glob with a taut surface. We proof in baskets that have some flour dusted in them. We bake on a stone in the oven. I think that's an important part. If you don't have a stone, give it a shot in bread pans and let me know how it goes.
We do 3 small round loaves. That's 1 small loaf a day for us (we bake every 2 days), and 1 to give away.

Proof

This is another flavor spot in the process. We always proof overnight. Liza only allows baking in the fall/winter so, we just put the loaves on a tray, cover them with a thickish cotton cloth, and stash them in the garage overnight. Temp so far this year has high-20's to mid-40's in the garage. We don't have a car or start any engines in the garage either.

Baking

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As noted above, we bake with a stone. I've tried pans and fancy french loaf pans, but my favorite is just on the stone. We have the stone on the second-to-lowest rack of the oven. We have an old aluminum saute pan on the lowest rack of the oven.
Here's the baking process:

• Bring the proofed loaves out of the cold. At this point, you're on the hook for baking... unless you decide within a half-hour or less that you want to wait, in which case you can rechill the loaves. Otherwise, the loaves go in the oven after about 1.5 hours of sitting at room temp. If you wait too long, they may over proof and you'll get a denser loaf. You want "oven spring" and that comes from the final burst of activity when the yeast get blasted with hot, moist air. That's what I've read anyway. But it's true about over proofing. We had an ah-ha moment when we were rushed and instead of proofing for 2-3 hours, we loaded the bread in about 1.5 hours and it was all the difference in the world.
  
  One last thought: a couple nights when it's been super cold, we basically had to thaw the loaves on the counter, then start counting the 1.5 hours after we figured they were thawed. So, it's ok if a bit of freeze gets in there too.
• Pre-heat the oven at 500F for an hour. Make sure your pan is in there. If you're not using a stone, you should probably put the the rack in the middle. The stone diffuses the direct heat nicely, so you can set the stone low in the oven.
• Dump the loaves onto a peel or some such device. They may not look impressively "proofed." In fact, they may look a bit flat. If you've made a lot of more traditional quicker-rising bread, then you probably expect to see poofier proofing, but trust that what you're seeing is right. Put some cornmeal or semolina on the peel so you don't stick. Slash the top or not and load up the bread.
• Dump boiling water (1/2 cup or so?) into the screaming hot pan on the bottom rack of the stove. Be careful. You'll understand why when the boiling water hits the pan. Don't sue me if awful things happen. Lots of steam and splashing of boiling hot water will occur. Don't sue me. I'm only suggesting you do this at your own risk. Some folks put ice cubes in there too.
• Turn the oven down to 450F. Don't try and outsmart the system by just setting the oven to 450F in the first place. You want to bake at 450F, but by the time you load and fuss with the water, you've let a lot of heat escape. Stone or not: you don't want the burners going full torque when you've got the bread in there if you can avoid it. This process avoids it.
• If you divided your loaves into 3 sections, then they'll take about 17 minutes to bake. If in half, then I would say about 25 minutes. If you're doing one loaf: don't. But if you did, probably around 40 minutes, but to be sure: stick an instant read thermometer in there and don't pull the bread out of the oven util it reads about 210F. In any case, rotate the bread at the half-way point to get even browning.
• Let the bread cool on a wire rack. A wire rack allows air to move under the bread as it cools and it's an essential piece of equipment.

Eating, Storing, Freezing, Re-heating

We store our bread in a "bread bag," which is just a heavy cotton bag in a dark drawer in our kitchen.

we freeze this bread all the time. Freezes great. To thaw, just let it sit on a counter until it's not hard. Then let it sit for another 40 minutes or so.

Re-heating: get the oven going to about 350F, and put a thawed loaf in for 10-15 minutes. This bread re-heats/crisps really well.