Potato bread Conquered !

Dear Foodies,

Taste of glorious victory...

After my previous post on the Potato bread doing the rounds in the food blogs, thanks to the Daring Bakers. I got a lot of nudging from a couple of daring bakers themselves and from a few encouraging bloggers to try making it own my own Potato bread. Most of the baker's made a focaccia bread from the dough and it just looked so yummy. I just love focaccia and Bee's suggestion that the dough could be converted into a pizza dough pushed me into trying it ASAP. So here it is...the best bread that I have made and possibly the best that I have tasted tooo :)

I read a lot of the potato bread recipes last week and so had a rough idea of what the procedure was. I used Meeta's recipe as a base...I say that as I have never been able to follow a recipe to the T. I always read it thru and then go about doing my own thing. And in that aspect the potato bread is very very forgiving. I wanted to make the bread small enough for me to be able to finish it and so had to reduce her recipe. Now that would mean a few calculations were in the way, but the lazy me decided to go ahead with guess work.

I started out with 5 fingerling potatoes, a mix of white and purple ones. They were the only ones I had. I mashed them up with a potato masher and then added about 2 cups of the potato water. I used 1 1/2 cup of All purpose flour and 1 cup of whole wheat flour (chapati atta), 2 tsp of yeast and salt to taste. I also added crushed dried herbs: thyme, oregano and rosemary, to the flour and mixed it well. I added the luke warm potato mixture and then used about another 1 1/2 cup of flour while kneading the dough. It is a sticky dough !

To ensure that the dough got a chance to rise, I let it sit in the oven. I pre-heated the oven at 100F for a 2 minutes and turned it off. This barely warmed the air inside and by closing the oven I was able to trap it in too. The temp was just right I guess cos my dough nearly tripled in size in under 30 mins :)

For toppings I used sun dried tomatoes, roasted pimentos and some more rosemary. I brushed the bread with quite a bit of olive oil too. I absolutely LOVE rosemary. It is such a fragrant herb and pairs really really well with breads and is glorious with olive oil. I also grated some asiago cheese right after the bread came out of the oven.

The bread had the PERFECT texture. The dough nearly tripled in volume in just 30 mins and did the same after the toppings were added and that totally reflected in its texture. The rosemary was what did the magic for me. I am going to use it more often in my cooking. The aroma from the herbs and the freshly baking bread filled my apartment and was ultra comforting. I had 2 pieces of the bread, still a little warm, with some olive oil with salt & pepper. I must tell you it was faaaar better than the bread at any of the Italian restaurants I have been too.

A huge Thank you to the bloggers who encouraged me to try this bread. I Love you guys for it, this one is totally for you. I am surely going to make it often, infact I plan to bake one for my friends when I visit them next week. All of you who were tempted by photos of the potato bread, please go ahead and try it. You won't regret it !