George Lang's Potato Bread with Caraway Seeds

We've skipped a couple here, in the name of (a) getting some less-similarly-white-bread recipes, and (b) doing some recipes I can actually accomplish. The recipes I can't accomplish include Broiled White Free-Form Loaf (which requires an oven with a broil setting, instead of an oven with broiler) and Pullman Loaf (which requires bread pans with locking lids that keep the loaf all square like). So here we are. Bread with mashed potatoes and caraway seeds!

Sounded exciting. And can I just say, I love buying spices in bulk—which is to say, in tiny quantities from the bulk bins. When you just need half a tablespoon of caraway seeds, no need to spend $4 on a whole little thing of them! Get them from the bulk bin, and pay 8¢. Literally! 8¢ at Berkeley Bowl bought me twice as many caraway seeds as I need. One year I made a turkey for thanksgiving that called for like 20 different spices for a spice rub, and I went to Rainbow Grocery and got them all from the bulk bins for a total of about a dollar, instead of the $80 I would have spent buying all the bottles. Brilliant! But I digress.

Mashed potatoes! Caraway seeds! The dough smelled really good and pungent. But man, it's a lot of dough! It called for 2lb/8c of flour! Which is roughly what I put in, and then I kneaded it for nearly half an hour trying to reach the point where "the dough is elastic and supple and has great life in it." Well, James, that point never quite came, and I kept adding a quarter-cup of flour every two minutes and it was still wet and sticky and eventually I just called it done. Phew!

The recipe calls for baking in an oven-proof skillet, but we thought this'd be a great time to pull out our big Le Creuset.

And we were right! It baked up to nearly the size of the damn pot, but it got a nice brown crust. We should have brushed the top with oil to make it match the sides, but it's still pretty.

If you can't tell from the photos, it's a HUGE ass loaf. I mean, look there, it's much bigger than our kettle. It's, well, the size of the Le Creuset. No reason it couldn't be two regular sized loaves—that'd be more convenient, and give more crust (and the crust is, again, fabulous). The only benefit of the one-big-loaf is that it looks pretty awesome, and, as Amelia said, "It makes me feel like a peasant."

Oh, and it's very tasty. Rich, with only mild flavors of potato and caraway. Great crumb, moist and dense but not too dense. The crust is crunchy but not tough. Makes great toast, pairs very nicely with butter. Beard said he likes his buttered toast with thinly sliced radishes, so I had that for breakfast and it was very nice too. I'll definitely make this bread, in smaller sizes, again.

White Free-Form Loaf

As has been noted by many scholars, now is not the point in my life with lots of available time for, say, cooking and blogging. And I persist! But I started this recipe without realizing what a time-commitment it was, and only by sheer chance did things work out for me to do all the steps. Make a sponge, which you let rise over a night or two, and then make a dough which gets not one, not two, but THREE rises! For heaven's sake, Beard, what kinds of free-time loafers (pun intended) do you think we are! He also exhorts us to line the oven with heavy tiles, which I didn't do, and a pan of water, which I did. And to line a baking sheet with cornmeal, but last time the cornmeal burnt and smelled bad, so I used parchment instead. Furthermore, this is the first recipe that has required "hard wheat" flour. Laurel assures me that he means essentially high-protein flour, and that I can use bread flour with impunity. So I did.

Verdicts on all these things:
Heavy tiles—jury's still out
Pan of water—can't tell if it helped at all
Parchment vs Cornmeal—parchment seemed fine, if less rustic
Bread Flour—didn't seem to make much difference
Three rises—honestly, I thought that (plus the very moist dough) would give the bread  some nice rustic big bubbles inside, but it didn't. Lovely, dense crumb, but no big bubbles.

Overall: Again, a fine tasting, beautiful white bread. He says to bake "until the bread is a delicious-looking dark color," and I was a little gun-shy so the bread was a bit underdone on the bottom. The dough was nice to work with and all, but took forevah. It's a nice bread, but again, not particularly better than the Basic White Bread, and way more work. Or at least, way more time. Amelia thinks there won't be a really exciting recipe until we get out of white-bread territory, so perhaps we'll do something more adventurous next time.