I am a potato head – ahem – bread – ahem – I mean I made a potato bread :-D

Thanks to @akippon and @shanibeer I finally subdued my lazy and fearful self and started another bread adventure. After last years failed attempt to grow sour dough I was a bit disheartened and my bread baking was exchanged to baking cakes and cookies. Moreover, the bread baking reminds me of my fathers’ illness, as he was the bread baker of our family….
But here I am against all odds trying to bake a potato bread.
The decision for this variety of bread came spontaneously: I woke up yesterday, wanted to start a dough and had two cooked potatoes in the fridge. I always use Lutz Geislers books for baking (because they are the only ones I possess 😂) and the potato bread is one of the first recipes in my book. Yeast is always in the fridge, salt and water staples and the requested organic 550 wheat flour I found in the supermarket next to our flat.




Geisslers recipes could be made with or without a starter dough and as I was so eager to bake, I went on without one. First step is to mix the salted water with the flour. Then I diffused the tiny amount of yeast (4 g) which is necessary in tepid water and gave it in the mixing bowl. The potatoes I mashed with a fork, but as I now know, I should have been more carful to really get them mashed into fine crumbles.
Now a bit of mixing and kneading to form a soft dough. As always with Lutz Geisslers I am uncomfortable with the softness of the dough, but I try to trust 😊🌺
The dough has to rest for 8 hours at 18-20 C degrees and only after this first 8 hours the ‚action‘ sets in. The dough must be stretched: I pull out a a part of the dough and fold it over the rest. I precede with this technique clockwise two times. After this I can feel a bit more resistance during the stretching, which means the gluten connections are forming. I stop with the stretching and the dough I went to bed.




Next morning the dough was risen again, and big bubbles were visible. I treated the dough to another stretching and waited 3 hours so that the yeast had roughly 24 hours to develop from start to finish. Lutz Geissler recommend baking the bread in a heavy cast iron pot with lid and I followed his lead. Not only the oven has to heat up to 250 degrees but also this pot. During this heating time I stretched the dough a last time and shaped its final form. The dough now has again one hour to rise. This should be done with the bread upside down, but to simplify this process I put the bread on a baking sheet in a bowl. When the time is up I grab the baking sheet and put it with the dough into the hot pot. Lid on the pot, temperature on 230 degree and on the baking goes.




After 35 minutes I open the lid so that the bread can develop a darker and flakier crust. All together I baked the bread for 45 minutes.




The bread is tasty with a thin crust and it is very soft… too soft for my liking. I cannot taste the potatoes, but I guess they are responsible for the bread’s softness. Next time I want to try out a spelt bread which needs a cooked piece of dough (Kochstück – no idea how it is translated into English)

Walking