Grounding habits: baking bread

I started making all of our bread decades ago, not being able to find whole-grain bread that was very good.  In the small Georgia college town where we lived at that time, we could buy commercial whole-wheat bread and "mixed-grain" loaves, but nothing like the seeded whole-grain breads available in Germany when I lived there after graduate school.

Our recent time in Germany reminded me again of how delicious the seeded sourdough breads were, so I thought I'd try to get close to some of the ones we enjoyed in my home-baked loaves.  I wrote a bit more about that in this post.

Now, living in a town full of artisan bakers, I don't really need to bake my own bread, but have done so for such a long time, I'm mindful of how much that's been something that I've been doing as a regular practice for a long time, creating alchemy with yeast, whole-grain flour, and water, often adding nuts and dried fruit.

But I'd never added wheat berries, cracked rye or the variety of seeds that some of the recipes for Vollkornbrot include, nor have I kept a sourdough starter active for some years now. The current one I've made is a rye starter, since I was trying to do an all-rye bread with a slightly sour tang.

Vollkorn brot with and with/out seeds on crust

I was pretty pleased with these loaves, as they had a nice flavor and excellent texture.  Still not very sour, but perhaps my starter needs more age...