The moral of this story is, "Don't rush the bread." And I knew that going in. But I really wanted to have it fresh out of the oven with soup for lunch. By the book, this bread should require 5-6 hours on the day of baking, but I figured that with my warm house I could make it work.
This formula calls for a biga, a firm preferment that is made the night before and refrigerated. I got up at 6:15am when the alarm clock went off (the first time, no snoozing) and pulled the biga out of the fridge to warm up while I showered. Then I rushed back out to the kitchen to mix my dough. I barely glanced at the cookbook as I went, and that is where I made my big mistake. I read, "3 1/2 cups all purpose flour; 2 1/2 cups bread flour." PR occasionally calls for both types, and I always just use bread flour, so I dumped 6 cups of bread flour in my mixing bowl along with my biga, salt, yeast, sugar, and malt powder. I added the smidge of olive oil called for, and then did a double take when I got to the water. It only called for 3/4 cup. I knew that would be a ridiculously stiff dough. But that's what it said to do, so I did it. As I struggled to bring the dough together, wondering also why PR would specifically call for a 4qt mixing bowl for such a large batch of dough, I looked back over the entire formula. And this time I read, "3 1/2 cups biga; 2 1/2 cups bread flour." Ouch.
Since I had basically doubled the flour, I decided to salvage my dough by doubling everything else, except of course the biga. I ended up with a dough that felt right and I went with it. After kneading, I left the dough to rise to double, but I kept a close eye on it and divided and shaped as early as I possibly could. Since my batch was doubled, I made two loaves and a batch of breadsticks. After proofing for about 45 minutes, I called it good and baked them all together, with the loaves on my stone on the bottom oven rack and the breadsticks on a pan on the top rack.
This is one more hearth bread in which I failed to achieve the open crumb I wanted. I handled it as gently as I could, but I think rushing both rises was a big mistake. The bread tasted good, and we enjoyed it, but J4 said that I have to do this one again since it had half the biga it was supposed to. One more thing to fix next time: I wish I had waited and baked the breadsticks separately. They were soft on the inside from the high baking temperature and hard on the outside from the steam used in hearth baking. We decided we would prefer them to either be crunchy or soft, not halfway between. But they looked fun.
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