French bread process development

I've made another few batches of French bread using the recipe from before. Here are my conclusions (no pictures though):

The recipe:

1. Mix 1/2 C whole wheat flour, 1 C white flour, and 1/2 t salt.
2. Dissolve 1/2 t yeast in 3/4 C warm water and mix solution into dry mixture
3. Let sit 15 min.
4. Dump goopy mess out onto well-floured surface
5. Knead in additional white flour (1/4 to 1/2 C) until satisfied
1. It should be dry enough that you can knead it 6 times without additional flour without sticking to the surface
2. It'll probably still stick to your hands and generally be a pain to knead
3. It should still be wet enough that it sticks if you knead it more than 10 times
6. Let rise until nearly doubled (~2 hr)
7. Fold, let rise again until doubled (~2 hr)
8. Shape, let rise while oven preheats (10-20 min)
9. Slash
10. Bake 30 min. @ 425°F
11. Bake 20 min. @ 350°F
12. Cool for 10 min. before cutting

Sensitivity to parameters

I don't have a lot of process control for the kneading/hydration, so I think it must be relatively robust to errors there. I think step 3 is pretty important for getting nice, elastic gluten chains, so that may unload some of the sensitivity to kneading quality.

Salt is pretty easy to measure repeatedly, so that's not a huge issue. I've been using different amounts of yeast, and that just seems to affect rise times.

Rise time, too, is not terribly sensitive. A visual inspection of volume change appears to be sufficient.

Punch down and shaping seem to affect the crumb: to get big, uneven bubbles in the bread you'd want to do these very lightly.

Finally, I've been getting lots of rise in the oven with this recipe compared to some past ones. I think having more water and step 3 both make the dough more elastic and able to support the steam generated in the oven. I suspect that the short post-shaping wait also helps keep the dough elastic going into the oven.

Slashing has a large effect on how it rises in the oven, especially in the distribution of added volume.

So that's it! I'd feel confident calling this recipe a rev A release.