Potato Bread

Well after my spiritual revelation last time, this post will be about food, the weather, printers and shopping.  

The weather has wrecked all our gardening plans this year, most of the flower seeds either got washed away, or rotted in  the ground, the slugs carpet the ground, and have climbed up into some amazing places (no pictures of that I’m afraid) and most of my veg have either been eaten or soaked. The stems of all my second early potatoes were rotting and eaten, so to salvage what I could I dug the rest up. Not a bad crop but looking at the number of small tubers, I wonder just how many more large potatoes I would have had in August.

I think we will be eating a lot of Potato dishes in the coming few days.

We were going to Exmouth on Tuesday, but it was raining so much as we got onto the M5 that on the spur of the moment we decided to go to Cribbs Causeway Shopping Centre near Bristol, at least it was inside 

Having worked out George’s camera for close up pictures, I found a couple of flowers that weren’t completely destroyed by the weather.



Will it go Red before the Slugs get it?



My printer has died, the black nozzles are blocked and no amount of cleaning, including special cleaning cartridges would get it going properly. So I have had to get another, which should be coming soon, probably when there is no-one here to receive it.

On Tuesday we had stuffed jacket potatoes, the inside is scooped out and refilled with a mixture of cheese and bacon, then put back in the oven until it’s all melted together.

I kept the potato flesh from these and used it in my bread making today, adding it to the dough for a wholemeal sandwich loaf.

I am using an autolyse of about 20 minutes in my technique, after reading about it on the web. I can really recommend it, as it helps the flavour and rise develop, but I add the yeast before autolyse, and the salt after, which while not strictly correct, seems to work just as well as adding both after.

So my proportions were,

320g Wholemeal flour,

180g Plain White flour,

180g cooked Potato, roughly mashed,

25g Lard,

20g Honey,

10g each of Salt and Yeast

350ml warm milk.

Mix everything except the salt until a rough dough is formed, leave for 20 minutes. Add the salt and mix again until a good dough develops (Window Pane test) Leave to rise for 90 minutes, knock back and shape, leave to prove for another 30 minutes while the oven heats up to 220 degrees.

Cook for about 40 minutes (Internal temp is 95 degrees), cool and enjoy.