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POTATO BREAD (another way)
Rasp or bruise the potatoes by a rasp or mill, dry the pulp, and reduce it to flour, which may then be made into bread, with the ordinary proportions of yeast. When potato flour is mixed with wheaten flour in equal proportions, it makes excellent bread, being light, and capable of keeping a long time. Bread made with potato flour alone is not, however, to be compared with wheaten bread. The following is a way of introducing potatoes into wheaten bread. Boil five pounds of potatoes well, and dry them over a fire or in the oven until they fall to pieces and become flour, which they will do if properly managed. Make of them a batter-like, thick gruel; strain this through a coarse sieve or colander; then mix this instead of water with twenty pounds of flour. If the yeast be good, the bread thus made will be as light and agreeable as that made of all flour.
Two methods sit in this one entry: a true potato flour bread, and the more practical trick of replacing the dough water with thin potato gruel. The second is the one worth making, and it scales down cleanly.
- Scale it downTwenty pounds of flour and five pounds of potatoes is a bakehouse batch, not a domestic one. The ratio is 1 lb potatoes to 4 lb flour, so for a single loaf use about 500 g (1 lb) flour and 125 g (4 oz) potatoes.
- The hinge: the potato replaces the water, not part of the flourBoil, mash and thin the potatoes to a pourable gruel, then use that liquid as the entire dough liquid. Add extra water only as needed to reach a normal dough, since an over-wet potato dough turns slack and sticky.
- "Potato flour" here is not modern potato starchThe book means whole dried potato ground fine, closer to today's dehydrated potato flour or even instant potato flakes. Modern potato starch is the extracted starch alone and behaves quite differently; it will not stand in at 50 per cent.
- Why the all-potato loaf disappointsPotato flour has no gluten, so a loaf made from it alone cannot hold gas and bakes dense and gummy. The 50/50 blend the author praises is still very heavy by current standards; 10 to 20 per cent potato is the usual modern proportion.
- Yeast quantity"The ordinary proportions of yeast" would most likely have meant a wet barm or brewer's yeast. For 500 g flour use about 7 g instant dried yeast, or roughly 20 g fresh; the potato sugars tend to make the dough ferment briskly, so watch it rather than the clock.
- Drying the potatoesIf you want the flour route, spread the cooked potato thin and dry it at 200-225F until it crumbles completely, then grind. Any residual moisture will make it clump and liable to spoil; store it airtight.
- BakingNo temperature is given. A loaf of this size bakes at 425F for the first 15 minutes, then 375F for another 25 to 30, to an internal temperature of about 200F.
- Keeping qualityThe claim that it keeps a long time is sound. Potato starch holds water and slows staling, which is exactly why potato dough is still used for rolls and sandwich loaves.
Potatoes went into bread for two reasons, and both are visible in this entry: they stretch expensive wheat flour, and they make a softer, longer-keeping loaf. Adulterating or extending bread with potato was widely debated in Britain from the late eighteenth century onward, when grain prices spiked and household manuals pressed every substitute they could find. The dried "potato flour" described here belongs to the same nineteenth-century enthusiasm for desiccated foods that produced potato meal and dried milk. Its descendants are still on the shelf as instant mashed potato, and the potato-water trick survives in the potato rolls and mashed-potato doughs of American and Irish home baking.