Mashed Potato Bread

Ok my friends I have been on a self-imposed hiatus for a bit longer than I meant to be.  I am just going to say that some parts of my life have been just a little more stressful than I was ready for.  Here is a video clip from a recent morning. 

By the way I am the guy in the chair...

Work has been just a wee bit stressful the past few weeks; do you remember several months ago I went to sunny Milford Connecticut for two weeks to learn to make sandwiches?  Well that restaurant is only days from opening now, it is the last step in a renovation has been a several months in the making.  Floors have been ripped up, walls torn down, the whole nine yards.  I have been getting in a little before five most mornings and working looong days. By the time I get home I am tired and maybe a little crabby.  I have been doing what I can to relax as time permits.

I have mentioned before that I used to hate baking especially anything that involved yeast, I didn't understand it, add to that I had heard all of the things that can go wrong when you use yeast.

"Make sure that you stuff a towel under the kitchen door while you let your bread rise, the slightest draft will kill the yeast."
"Don't mix bread in a metal dish it will ruin it."

"You absolutely can't make bread while it is raining."

"Measure all of you ingredients very precisely, even the slightest change will ruin your bread."

Read your mom's old church cookbook for more, they are out there.

Anyway several years ago I was suffering from insomnia and found that baking bread was an excellent sleep aid.  I mean think about it:

Realize that you can’t sleep and get out of bed at about ten o’clock

Open a bottle of wine while you put a packet of yeast in warm water to open up

Mix, kneed, rise, punch, pan, rise, bake

Enjoy the smell of fresh bread baking, when the bottle of wine was empty and fresh bread came out of the oven… what do you know, I was ready to sleep.

Insomnia hasn’t been a problem for me lately since I come home every day exhausted but I still find baking to be relaxing, like doing yoga only I don’t wake up so sore the next morning.  There have been quite a few experiments going on in my house lately.  This one is great though, just as light as air and soft, the recipe based on one I found on Food Network.  It actually makes a loaf with some dough left to make rolls… nice.

Potato Bread  

1 russet potato, peeled and cut into large chunks, or 1 cup leftover mashed potatoes 1 cup milk

3 TPS butter melted

2 tsp salt

1 TBS Sugar

1 TBS yeast

1/3 cup warm water

5 cups bread flour

Boil potato until soft. Drain and reserve cooking liquid mash until smooth.

Scald milk then combine with 1/2 cup reserved cooking liquid. Combine liquids and potato with butter, salt, and sugar in a large bowl. Set aside to cool to room temperature.

Meanwhile combine yeast and warm water, and set aside until foamy. When potato mixture has cooled, add yeast mixture. Then add flour a cup at a time and knead with a dough hook, or an electric mixer, until smooth and glossy, about 7 minutes.  This is that part where you have to ignore the “precisely measure your ingredients” myth.  Potatoes differ in size and moisture, you have add that last cup of flour slowly (or maybe a little more) to get the right feel.

Put dough in an oiled bowl and cover then set aside in warm place to rise about 1/2 hour. Punch dough down and knead a few times. Coat a 9 x 5 x 3-inch loaf pan. Place dough in pan, cover with plastic, and let rise until doubled, about 45 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake 30 minutes, until bread sounds hollow when tapped.

Focaccia

Yeast and I have had an ongoing kind of love/hate thing for quite a few years, I have to admit that is partly because I never had much experience as a baker or really in pastry of any sort.  Then there were all of the stories people would tell...

"You must mix yeast dough with a wooden spoon if you touch it with a rubber spatula it will never rise"

"Bread has to be mixed in a glass or ceramic bowl... it will get a metallic taste from a metal bowl."

"Lock your doors and put a towel under all of your windows!  even the slightest cool draft will make your bread fall."

Read your mom's old church cookbook the warnings are there,  I am not saying that I believed all of them but still I grew up a little afraid of yeast dough.  I have grown a little more accustomed to it now.  There is a method to yeast breads that is somewhat calming, the warmth of the kitchen the kneading, the rise and the gentle care that you take of it as it goes.  Years ago I started flirting with french bread when I was dealing with insomnia.

Does that make sense? let me explain a little, I couldn't sleep so I would get out of bed at 10:00 or so, open a bottle of wine and start a couple of loaves of french bread.  It worked like a charm, when the wine was gone and the fresh hot loaves were coming out of the oven I was ready to sleep! 

Last weekend I found myself a little stressed and I fell back on my old enemy come friend then therapist. Kris wasn't feeling well to the point that she had both of us a little shaken.  While she was being checked out by the Dr. the kids were playing with their new friends and I was alone in the house.  So Focaccia came to mind... why focaccia?  really I don't know but it seemed right.  Anyway here is how it went...

1 (1/4-ounce) package active dry yeast
1 2/3 cups warm water
5 cups unbleached all-purpose flour plus additional for kneading
2 tsp table salt
1/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Basil pesto and tomato sauce to top
a little Kosher salt

Mix yeast and warm water together in a bowl while that is blooming put flour and table salt into your mixing bowl.  After the yeast has activated (got all foamy around the edges of your bowl) add that to your flour mixture.  Blend with dough hooks for about 4-5 minutes then turn onto a floured surface and knead for a minute or two.  Put your mixture into an oiled bowl and let rise, covered in plastic for about an hour until it doubles in size.  When that is done press the dough into a well greased (use about half the olive oil above for that) 10x15 inch pan and let rise (covered in a damp dish towel this time) for about 25-30 minutes.  while that is rising preheat oven to 400.

Now is the time to spread your toppings on it, I used pesto sauce, fire roasted tomatoes, minced fresh garlic and a bit of sea salt.  Drizzle with the rest of the olive oil then poke it with your fingers until it feels right, some of the holes should be shallow some should tear the dough all the way through to the pan.  Set this in the oven and bake for about 25 minutes.

Kris is doing fine by the way, several Dr.s checked her out from top to bottom.  It seems that as we age our bodies like to do something to shake us up every year or so.  Maybe it is nature's way of reminding us to take better care of ourselves.

Pulling one from the Archives

Ok, my friends I have to admit that I am exhausted...  Work has been crazy of late, on top of being unnaturally busy... one of my co-workers left us and we are waiting for an "appropriate time to replace him", another has gone completely off his chum.  Add to that personal financial things that ebb and flow in all of our lives are at an ebb spot right now.  I just haven't had the wherewithal to put words together in a way that all of you deserve... so I am pulling one out of the archives.  The writing is a little ham handed but this recipe really is good.   So grab some leftover donuts and a handful of eggs and give this a try!  Me... I have some great (for me) pictures and some good ideas coming up so stay tuned.  Until then, enjoy this. 

When it comes to writing recipes for this blog I can classify them three ways, recipes that are classics that I may or may not have written down, but have been in my repertoire for years Roast Corn and Black Beans are two examples of those. I also make up new concoctions of things that I think would taste good for example Caprese Mole and Sugar Cane Skewered Shrimp were both made up on the fly. The Third Category are the recipes that I have to study before I prepare them things that I have never made fall into that category, like preserved Lemons and most baked goods do too, the complexities of leavening agents and the ratios of liquids that make a custard still scare me.

Bread pudding has always been a favorite of mine, but it falls into that third category I really like it, but don't make it often, because I need measuring cups and a recipe. Bread Pudding can go well with a cup of coffee in the afternoon or add a little caramel sauce and it is a great dessert. The thing I always liked about it is that at the places that I used to get bread pudding it was never the same thing twice; the baker would take the bread, muffins, scones and donuts that didn't sell one day and throw them into a mixer and sell them as bread pudding the next. As I started to look for recipes most of the ones I found started with fresh bread. Something seems wrong in going out and buying a fresh loaf of Brioche or French Bread then cutting it into cubes and leaving it on the counter over night to use. So I started looking at the ratios of bread to eggs to milk figuring that if I got that part down the rest would come together just fine. What I found was that in most cases the recipes called for 1 pound of bread, 4 cups of dairy (some cream some milk, some a combination of them) and 8 eggs. After those basic ingredients the recipes were all over the place some with chocolate chips, nuts, currants, cranberries pretty much anything seems to work after the base is together, which makes this fun.

The Bread pudding that I made was:

1 pound of bread (I had donuts, bagels and French bread in this)

2 cups half and half (it is all I had)

2 cups milk

8 eggs

1tsp vanilla

1 cup of brown sugar

1 cup of diced dried figs

Yes I am that guy, the one that doesn't have raisins in the house but does have a big bag of dried figs in the refrigerator. Dice up the assorted bread and set in a large bowl then mix the rest of the ingredients except for the Figs (nuts, currents, whatever you decide to use) and poor over the bread mixture. This needs to sit for a while until to soften the bread if you used heavy bread (like baguettes) you may want to wait as long as 1-2 hours. Now is a good time to preheat your oven to 325 and grease a 9x13 inch baking pan. Mix any additional items into the mess that you have and poor it into the pan.

This Bakes for about an hour and 15 minutes until a knife or toothpick comes out clean when inserted. When it first comes out of the oven it looks like a giant Souffle but it pretty quickly "falls" to what you expected. I am getting a little ahead of myself here... the sauce for this is so good!

1/2 Stick of Butter

1/2 Cup Sugar

3/4 Cup milk

1/2 Cup Baileys Irish Cream

a little Cornstarch slurry

Melt the butter and sugar together then add the milk and Irish Cream once that is simmering add the cornstarch slurry to thicken. Let it cook for a few minutes until it is the thickness that you want. When you are ready to serve just poor a little bit of the sauce on top of a piece of bread pudding and serve.