Home milled flour sourdough observations

I've been using home milled flour now for a couple weeks.

My setup: I have a drum each of hard red winter and hard white winter wheat, soft spring wheat, durum wheat, rye, and corn. I am using starter from commercial flour and it's about a year old and has been faithful and trusty.

I made a sourdough loaf that came out perfect, finally.

What I did was this.

1. Revived and reactivated the starter, as usual.

2. Created a poolish with a bit of starter, and a cup or so of flour and made it batter-like consistency. I used freshly ground hard red winter wheat berries for this formula.

3. Let it ferment to a point where it was 3 times volume and ready to collapse.

4. Added in salt, additional flour, so about 2 times more flour then used in the poolish. Dough was quite slack. I used slack dough handling methods to fold the dough a few times every 20 minutes during the first hour and a half.

The fermentation really took hold and in a matter of 3 or 4 hours, the bulk rise was finished.

I heated a dutch oven and cover at 450F. for 1 hour, and picked up the dough and put it in the pot, covered it and baked 25 minutes on 450F, then uncovered and baked for about another 30 minutes at 325. Sourdough home milled wheat flour can create gummy bread if you don't bake it at a temperature low enough to dry it out.

It came out amazing. I will take a picture of the next loaf (going in the oven as I write.) The flavor was indescribable, like a fine wine, with a long rye-like finish.