“This fine example of gutsy Middle European peasant bread, from The Cuisine of Hungary, is baked free form, rises well, looks appetizing, and has a delicious ‘nose’.”
-James Beard, Beard on Bread
“I was too intimidated by the loaf of potato bread to cut into it, so I just ate some more Prune Bread.”
-Mike
“It’s a Frankenloaf!”
-Me
Since I still had 4 pounds of leftover potatoes, it was time to try another potato bread recipe. This recipe is very different from Whole-Meal Bread with Potatoes because it uses all white flour instead of mostly whole-wheat flour.
Here are the ingredients:
I boiled and mashed the potatoes beforehand to save some preparation time. As I was attempting to knead my bread dough, I realized that I didn’t really mash them enough: there were little potato chunks poking out of my dough. In the future, I should probably invest in a potato masher–or just use instant mashed potatoes.
George Lang’s Potato Bread with Caraway Seeds yields a fairly large loaf of bread. Here it is after its second rising:
The baking time for this recipe is 1 hour; I checked on my loaf at the 30 minute mark and realized that I was in for some trouble.
“Mike,” I said as I peered into the oven, “It’s a Frankenloaf!”
“What are you talking about?”
Then he joined me at the oven, to stare at the loaf of bread that had a strange bulge protruding like a tumor off its side, had expanded to fill the cookie sheet that it was baking on, and almost was touching the top of the oven. Hands down, it’s the largest loaf of bread I’ve ever seen. It was monstrous.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that it is delicious: light and chewy, with the distinctive flavor of caraway seeds blending nicely with the moistness of the semi-mashed potatoes. Because I don’t want to be eating George Lang’s Potato Bread with Caraway Seeds for the next two weeks, and also so the loaf doesn’t attack us as we sleep, I cut it into two pieces and froze one. The half loaf fit in a gallon bag only after I had strategically hacked some pieces off the edges.