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.