26 November 2007

Daring Bakers: Tender Potato Bread

Potato bread focaccia, with mixed cured meat

Warm focaccia filled with Parma Prosciutto: to die for!!!

Last time I’ve seen Annemarie in London, we just ended the Bostoni Cream Pie challenge, and we were a bit disappointed about our Chiffon cake turned out…
Then we moved to one quite corner, and whispering, we spoke about the new challenge. She already had the time to look it up, so she revealed to me what was about. At first we thought: “oh, that’s it?”
But then I remembered that once, the mother of one of my former boyfriends, told me that she was adding a boiled potato to the normal pizza dough, to make it fluffier… And her pizza was one of the best home made pizza I’ve ever tried!!!
So, here we are with this amazing potato bread!
Flour: the recipe was calling for all-purpose flour, suggesting to use an organic one, so I did. Not any fancy big name organic flour, just the Esselunga (the most widespread supermarket chain in northern Italy) organic all-purpose flour. And then for the whole-grain, yet again Esselunga organic whole-grain flour.
Potatoes: recently we’ve been to France, and shopped at the supermarket (I love to shop in French supermarket: you can find so many amazing stuff!!!). So I bought French potatoes and, honestly, they are very good potatoes: in Italy is difficult to find potatoes as good! Quite floury, good for baking, wonderful for boiling, and I would use them for Italian gnocchi too…
Yeast: I’ve used fresh yeast, 25 g. I rarely use active dry yeast, only when I don’t have fresh yeast at home and I have the urge for pizza…
Of course I knead the entire loaf by hand, and, as usually, it was a wonderful moment, very liberating, as if I was detoxifying from the whole working week and free my mind to reach higher level of relaxations…
Of course if “normal people” would read this last sentence they would rather think I’m completely crazy, but all my fellow Daring Bakers would absolutely agree with me: kneading is good for mind and soul!

And I have to say that this recipe, especially the quantities, are just perfect! I haven’t use a single gram more of the indicated flour!

And as the dough was quite a lot, I made:

Potato bread

A small loaf

Potato bread Rolls

Rolls

Potato bread focaccia

Simple focaccia with coarse salt