In a search for more uses of potatoes, I suggested to my mother that we should try to make potato bread. She went on an internet crawl, found a recipe, and tried it out. It was good, but we agreed it could be improved by adding garlic and marjoram, as well as a few other tweaks. So we did that.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
On the left is a loaf without garlic, on the right is one with. My mother cannot eat garlic, therefore two distinquishable loafs. I ate half of the right loaf in one go for dinner last night, it was so good.
The ingredients:
- 680 g of potatoes
- 2 spoons of oil
- 1 teaspoon of sugar
- 150 ml of lukewarm water
- 40 g of fresh yeast or 21 g of dry yeast
- 665 g of wheat bread flour
- 4 teaspoons of salt
- 2 teaspoons of whole caraway seeds
- 2 spoons of marjoram
- 2 spoons of crushed garlic
Process:
- Boil the whole potatoes in slightly salty water and peel them after cooling. Crush the potatoes, add oil, and sugar with yeast dissolved in warm water (dried yeast can be stirred into dry flour). Mix into a paste and add flour, caraway, and salt until the dough is smooth. Lastly, add majroram and garlic.
- Let the dough rise for 30 min under cover, then divide into parts and form the first batch of loaves of desired shape and size, and put them on baking trays with baking paper sprinkled with flour. Cover with a cloth and let rise another 30 minutes.
- Preheat the oven to 220 °C, score the loaf, and put it in the oven. Put a can with a splash of water on the bottom of the oven, close it, and lower the temperature to 180°C.
- Bake 40-50 minutes until the crust is firm and brown.
- Whilst the first batch is baking. The second half can be formed, and it should just about sufficiently rise in the meantime.
- Optional – when almost finished, it is possible to apply salty water on the crust.
Now I am going to eat the other half of the loaf for today’s dinner.
I haven’t made potato bread for years, partly because it was so damn good toasted with lashings of butter and marmalade. We found that, if we could refrain from eating all the loaf in one go, potato bread stayed fresh for longer than our usual alternatives. It really is wonderful stuff.
That is a good idea.
My next batch of bread will be potato bread.
… but my sourdough seems a bit peaked …
I’ll be giving this a try. It looks great. Although I may drop the caraway seeds as I’m not much of a fan of them.
I have a question about your marjoram. Are you using dried or fresh? I’ve found it difficult to find fresh marjoram in the US.
I like potato bread. Here the most usual kinds of potato bread are sweet sand sour rye bread with made with potatoes (perunalimppu) and flatbread made with potatoes and wheat flour (perunarieska). I think I should buy perunalimppu more often. The problem with perunarieska for 1-person household is that it doesn’t keep very well and freezing it isn’t a good option.
Ice Swimmer you have reminded me that there are British flat breads made with potato, called farls or potato scones* depending on which part of the UK you are from, they are cooked on a flat pan or ‘bak stone’. I suspect that flat breads were developed everywhere really early as we all seem to have our variations made with with local ingredients. I know in the UK, because they don’t require an oven, they were a staple of the poor; in some areas you can still find them just because they are so damn good, one example being oatcakes* made with a yeast batter found around the Potteries and Derbyshire.
* potato scones aren’t anything like regular British scones having no leavening at all, and oatcakes similarly aren’t like regular cakes despite having leavening, they’re more like pancakes.
@flex, we are only ever using dried majroram. I am not aware of any recipe that requires fresh one.
@Charly, thank you. One thing we noticed when we were in Prague was the abundance of recipes which used marjoram. It was not an herb I had used often previously (tarragon, oregano, and thyme have been my go-to herbs), but I’m using it a lot more now, especially in soups.
@Jazzlet -- just fyi, even down in Gloucestershire, Sainsburys stock Staffordshire oatcakes, usually just a single box on a top shelf above eye level, with a ridiculously short shelf life (I keep meaning to have a go at making them fresh just because they go mouldy so quickly, and recently found this look at different recipes -- https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/mar/02/how-to-make-the-perfect-staffordshire-oatcakes)