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Bread Made with Potatoes
Mash some boiled potatoes while hot, adding a little tepid water and an ounce or so of German yeast and some flour. Let this ferment in a warm place for six hours, and place in a pan with flour and a little salt, mixing the whole into a dough. Stand for another three hours to rise, make into loaves and bake as quickly as possible.
Oscar gives proportions for nobody — this is a sponge-and-dough method written for a baker who already knows the ratios. The useful parts are the sequence and the reasoning; the numbers you supply yourself.
- The hinge: cool the potatoCool the potato -- the recipe mashes the potato hot and adds only "a little tepid water," but yeast dies above roughly blood heat, so in practice you want the mash no warmer than your hand before the yeast goes in. Mash, add the water, and wait.
- German yeastCompressed fresh cake yeast, sold in blocks. One ounce is about 28 g; substitute roughly one-third that weight in instant dry yeast, so about 9 g, near 3 teaspoons. The long timings are characteristic of a sponge-and-dough method rather than proof of weak yeast.
- Working proportionsThe recipe gives none, so these are a starting point rather than Oscar's: try about 1 lb boiled potatoes to 3 lb flour, with roughly 1 lb of that flour going into the sponge and the rest into the final dough, and salt at about 2 percent of the total flour weight by modern practice. Water to bring the dough together — potato mash carries a good deal already.
- The two risesSix hours for the sponge and three for the dough are long even though the recipe specifies a warm place. With modern yeast at 70F expect the sponge in nearer 2 to 3 hours, when it has domed and begun to fall, and the dough in about 90 minutes. Judge by volume and smell, not the clock.
- Salt goes in lateNote that no salt touches the sponge. This is deliberate — salt slows fermentation, and the sponge is meant to run hard. Add it with the second flour.
- "Bake as quickly as possible"Most likely a hot oven rather than haste in getting the loaves in, though the book gives no temperature; a modern equivalent would be around 425-450F. Potato doughs brown fast because of the free sugars, so watch the crust; a 1.5 lb loaf takes 30 to 35 minutes and should read about 200F inside.
- Why potato at allThe starch holds water, so the crumb stays moist noticeably longer than a straight flour loaf, and the bread is softer and slightly sweet. Use a floury baking potato, not a waxy one, and rice or mash it smooth — lumps show as gummy pockets.
- YieldThe suggested proportions above would give about three 1.5 lb loaves.
Potato bread was a thrift measure long before it was a specialty: potatoes were cheaper than wheat flour, and bakers found that a proportion of mashed potato stretched the sack while producing a loaf that kept longer and staled more slowly. The practice is generally traced in English and German baking to the late eighteenth century, when grain prices were volatile and governments actively encouraged potato substitution. Oscar Tschirky includes it in a Waldorf book. The reference to "German yeast" is itself a period marker: compressed fresh yeast reached commercial bakeries through Austrian and German producers in the nineteenth century and was still known by that name in American kitchens at the turn of the century.