Recipes

[gardenman]

I have a lot of potatoes left over from Thanksgiving, so I decided to make a loaf or two of potato bread today. My standard potato bread recipe makes two traditional loaves and is very good, but it needs powdered milk and I'm out of powdered milk, so I looked for an alternative. I found Julia Child's recipe in her Baking with Julia cookbook and I'm giving it a try.

It used four and three quarters cups of flour to just one half cup of reserved potato liquid and two tablespoons of olive oil. (My standard recipe uses two cups of water to six cups of flour,  1 tablepoon of yeast and two teaspooons of salt.) You also have one and a half pounds of potatoes. (Roughly the same as my normal recipe.) When you start mixing this dough it seems impossibly dry. I checked the recipe several times to be sure I didn't overlook anything. Then I started scraping the flour down into the bowl and miracle of miracles, it started to come together. By the end you actually end up with a bit of a sticky dough. It's a short rising dough and pretty soon it'll be time to shape it, give it another short rise, then bake it.

I'm very intrigued by how it's going to turn out. I've never made a dough that behaves in that manner before. I trust Julia Child however, so I'm giving it a shot. If you ever make this recipe yourself, trust her when she says you don't need to add additional water. It will come together despite looking absolutely impossible in the beginning. 

[Lilysmom]

@gardenman, it sounds like it's going to turn out well.  You will have to come back and give us a report.  It's fun to try new recipes.

My father had a huge vegetable garden.  It was not uncommon for him to dig up potatoes, turnips and parsnips as winter long.

We are getting our first snowfall tonight coming up the eastern seaboard.  I spent this morning painting concrete animals for our nativity scene.  LM

[gardenman]

I just finished shaping it and it's in the final rise now. It looks and feels like a normal bread dough now, but it sure didn't look that way at the start. I was sure that either I'd misread the recipe, or the recipe was wrong, but it does all turn out well in the end. I'll be eating it in about an hour and a half, so we'll see how it tastes, but the shaping and proofing are going well.