Potato bread is special.  It’s wonderfully soft and chewy with a, wait for it, potato-y flavor!  How surprising, huh?  It makes great toast and is the perfect bread for BLT’s and ham sandwiches.  Don’t even get me started on egg salad sandwiches, which will be perfect for your leftover Easter eggs. Increasing the sugar by a few tablespoons and adding some currants to the dough and you’ll have…hot cross buns!  This is a very soft, sticky dough.  It should be; that’s the way most good potato bread doughs are.  Remove your watch and rings.  Set them someplace safe; some place where you will remember you put them…you know me…The Goddess gets into a discussion about food and she drops them in a glass and well, just remember where you put them!  When you make this in the bread machine, (you’ll get that recipe tomorrow) the dough will be stickier than this dough, because you simply can’t knead bread that is sticking to your hands.  I love the bread machine, but nothing is a satisfying as kneading bread, though I maintain that the kneading done by the machine is better than I can do it.

Now, get yourself a very large bowl.  I love heavy ceramic bowls, but they’re heavy and ceramic and they break when The Goddess isn’t paying attention and misses the counter, and bowl and dough crash to the floor…it’s not pretty.  That’s why I use a large stainless steel bowl. You’ll put wet ingredients in first, beat them up until well-combined, then the dry and mix it all together.  I told you this is a very wet dough, so it will be ridiculously sticky, as you can see.  But persevere…you’ll beat this into submission and bake a great loaf of bread or pan of rolls…or both, as I did here.  Isn’t The Goddess just a model of efficiency?

This is the recipe I used today, but I made a batch and a half, so your loaf will be smaller.

As you can see, I placed the water, eggs, butter, sugar, milk powder, salt, toasted onion and chives in the bowl.  Using a dough whisk; you can purchase one through King Arthur for around $17, but you can use a large wooden spoon just fine.  I mix them together until they are well combined.

 

Then I add the flour, vital gluten, instant yeast and dehydrated potato flakes.  I use dried potato flakes, when I make potato bread because it’s more convenient and it makes a darn fine loaf.  It’s a bit difficult to see, because the potato flakes are more or less the same color, but the potato flakes are on the far left, the vital gluten is under the yeast near the handle of the whisk.  I also threw in some poppy seeds and some coarsely ground black and pink peppercorns.  One thing to note, if you’re tempted to put the flakes into the water, resist that temptation.  The flakes will rehydrate and mess with the liquid/dry ratio.  Finally, mix the whole mess together, flour a counter top and drop the sticky dough out.  Sprinkle a little more flour over it and start kneading.  Add a few tablespoons of flour at a time, letting the dough “eat” up the flour as you knead it.  As you knead, the dough will stiffen a bit, as the gluten develops.

When you knead, use the heel of your hand, press down gently on the edge closest to you and push away.

 

 

 

 

Then you’ll make a quarter turn and do it all over again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Repeat over and over and over until your wrists hurt and your carpel tunnel is off the charts!  But, you will have damn good bread for dinner!

 

 

 

 

Place the dough in a large bowl; I just put it back in the bowl I mixed it in.  Put some oil on the top and cover loosely with plastic wrap.

 

 

 

 

Place the bowl of dough in a cold oven, turn on the oven for 30 seconds.  Turn the oven off and let the dough raise for about 30-45 minutes or until doubled.  When the dough finishes raising, it will be puffy and have doubled in size.

 

 

Recipes always say to “punch” the dough down, but really it’s better to gently push the dough down to deflate it a bit.

 

 

 

 

When you cut a chunk off; I want to make 4 hamburger buns for dinner tonight, which is why I made a little more dough than the recipe, the dough will have some small holes in it.  That’s a good thing.

 

 

 

Shape the dough into flat disks for hamburger buns, place in a well-greased pan

 

 

 

 

 

For a loaf, shape the dough into a tight log, folding the ends in and sealing them.  Place the log of dough in a well-greased loaf pan and place the pans in the cold oven.  I do the same thing I did with the dough; I turn the oven on for 30 seconds and then turn it off.  You MUST stand right there.  DO NOT walk away.  You just want the oven to warm a bit, but you don’t want the bread to bake at all.  Yeast loves warm, but will die with hot!   Think the temperature difference between a warm spring day in New England and the Fourth of July in Miami!

The rolls baked for 17 minutes; the bread baked for 27 minutes.  Always leave bread and rolls in their pans on a cooling rack (so the air circulates around the pan) for about 10 minutes before you try to remove the bread.  The bread will shrink just a bit from the sides of the pan (the rolls have done that) and will drop right out.

In a perfect world we would let a loaf cool completely before slicing, as slicing warm bread tends to compact the loaf a bit.  But since you’ve been smelling fresh bread baking for last little while and you really haven’t had lunch yet, yeah, that loaf isn’t going to cool…it’s going to slice open and there’s going to be good butter and maybe cheese involved…damn!  Fresh bread is heavenly.

 

Dinner is a hamburger on one of our buns, with some raw onion and whatever other condiments send you to the nether reaches of Nirvana.  See you there!