Gobble Gobble: Bread
No Thanksgiving is complete without a huge meal, and no meal is complete without bread. Tanna of My Kitchen in Half Cups, host of this month’s Daring Bakers challenge, was clever enough to coordinate her recipe with the major food event of every American’s (and Canadian’s?) year. Tanna chose tender potato bread adapted from Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s recipe in Home Baking: The Artful Mix of Flour & Tradition Around the World, which proved endlessly adaptable for holiday cooking and baking.
The recipe looked easy enough: mashed potatoes and potato water mixed with yeast and flour and then treated like regular bread, for a soft loaf with bits of potato sprinkled throughout it. I decided that I’d make some dinner rolls and a loaf that I could cut up and use for stuffing. I planned to wait until I got home for break, then knock it out on the Saturday of that weekend. Oh, how foolish.
My mom, confident in my abilities, insisted that I make a double batch so there would be plenty to go around, and I acquiesced. The first hurdle came when I realized that the original recipe doesn’t give the weight of the potatoes. It specifies only “medium to large floury (baking) potatoes,” which ignores not only the disparity in size among different potato varieties, but also among individual potatoes of one variety. Tanna suggested eight ounces for beginners and sixteen for advanced bakers, but at that point it was too late; my digital scale was at my apartment in Amherst. I picked out eight medium Russet potatoes, prepped them, and boiled them.
Alford and Duguid then had me mashing the potatoes and mixing in a most of the potato water, resulting in a very soupy mixture. I divided my double batch in half to make it more manageable and worked on one half at a time. Into the first half, I added some yeast and flour, let it percolate a bit, then added a couple more cups of flour and turn it out to knead. Except that even after several cups of flour, one of which was wheat, it was still soup. So I added more flour. And then I added more flour. And then I added more flour. I stopped measuring, but I would guess that my first half batch had about sixteen cups of flour. Sixteen cups!
So I kneaded the sticky dough, adding more and more flour until it was marginally unsticky. As I kneaded, I resigned myself to the bad bread: the extra flour would surely make it tough, and the yeast would surely be too weak to lift the extra weight. But I finally wrestled it into a loaf and two sets of pull-apart rolls, put it in the oven, and crossed my fingers.
To my surprise, the finger-crossing worked! The bread was soft and moist, not too dense but with a fine crumb. Okay, it wasn’t my favorite, but freshly baked bread can never be too bad. We ate a few slices of the loaf, and I cut the rest up to dry for stuffing. My mom took the rolls to a friend of hers, and I braced myself for the second batch, confident that the end result was worth it. Kinda.
I turned to my second bowl of potato soup and began to add flour. And add flour. And add flour. Until my white flour ran out. It was late, and I had no choice but to finish off the dough with wheat flour and hope that it wouldn’t affect it too much. I let the dough rise for the first time overnight, kneaded in some grated cheddar cheese and minced chives, shaped them into into rolls and froze them for Thanksgiving day. Wasn’t I clever?
Well, I thought I was. On Thanksgiving morning, I took the rolls out of the freezer and arranged them on baking sheets to thaw and rise. I probably didn’t take them out soon enough though, and I had to put them near the fire until they puffed up. And again, I don’t think I left them long enough because the rolls were dense and had a sour, yeasty taste. They were also tough and neither cheesy nor chivey. My guess is that too much wheat flour and too little cheese and chive are to blame, respectively.
They weren’t horrible. Like I said, freshly baked bread can never be too bad. Toasted with a little butter, it was okay, but I doubt I’d ever make them again. If I did, I’d leave out the potato water, which would reduce the massive amounts of flour. Nevertheless, the rolls were nice to have on the table and potato croutons were perfect in the stuffing. Like any Daring Bakers challenge, I learned a lot, and that’s what counts.
