Category Archives: Mellow Bakers

Roast Potato Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman

Roast Potato Bread Jeffrey HamelmanPotato, almond meal, rice, tree-bark, many other foodstuffs besides grains, get added into bread. This has a historical precedent; when times are hard and wheat expensive, it is common practice to bulk out the dough with a locally available and probably cheaper ingredient.

This bread is a reminder of those times according to Jeffrey Hamelman. It’s a good idea to keep these thoughts in mind;  climate change will bring many changes to the grains we have available to bake with and the way the world thinks about food.

Some quick notes on this bread:

I chopped the potato up, skin and all into 1 cm cubes, and roasted them in a shallow dish in the minimum of olive oil for about 25 minutes while I was cooking something else in the oven.

I added at least another 50  grams of water as my flour was very thirsty and the dough was very tight when I first mixed it.

All was going well and then I had to go out, so I put the dough in the fridge after the first hour at room temperature.  Three hours later I returned, and rescued the dough. I  flattened it out gently and folded it. After half an hour I divided it into two portions, rounded them up and popped the dough into bannetons which I left in a warm spot in the kitchen.

Life intervened again and when I finally came back to the kitchen two hours later they were well and truly risen, so I baked them as soon as the oven was up to temperature. They didn’t appear to be overproved, the slashes opened and they rose nicely in the oven. I loved Abby’s pattern on her loaves so I thought I’d try and do that.

These loaves had very thick crusts, which surprised me a little, given all the steam and were quite difficult to cut the first day. By the following day, the crusts had softened and the bread had developed more flavour and we are still eating our way through them happily this weekend.

Roast Potato Bread CrumbStrangely I can’t really taste the potato as a separate taste, it adds something but I can’t describe it. One can see the great colour the roast potato lends to the loaf , plus it adds a sort of unctuous chewy mouthfeel as well, something like crumpets but not as sticky.

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And today, Sunday, three days after I baked it, the sun has come out and look how lovely it looks still:

The sun has got his hat on!

Other Mellow Bakers who have tried this bread so far this month – and they all seem to really like it too – are :

If you would like to have a go, the other bakers have written out the formula on their blogs so no need for me to do that here, as I didn’t do anything different!

And after this I really have to face the braiding of the challah – watch this space.

Mellow Baking – Every Way OK.

Sourdough Rye Bread with Walnuts (Revisited)

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You didn’t think I was going to give up, did you?

No strange ingredients this time!  Only thing I did was put half light and half whole rye flour in the dough, but otherwise I measured to the nearest gram and followed the timings and was rewarded by the Spirit of the Rye!

This is a classic rye bread, full of flavour. Make sure your walnuts are sweet before you put them in the dough. I broke them up a bit but maybe not enough but I quite like the way they break through the top of the dough. This was a very firm dough, I proofed it on a couche cloth having shaped it into a sort of peaked oval with my hands and it didn’t spread sideways at all. I could maybe have left it another half an hour on the cloth, who knows?

Not one for those who don’t eat nuts or don’t like rye, but you can still look at the pictures.

That’s the last of the September breads for Mellow Bakers. To see how the others got on, here are some links to pictures from some of the other Mellows…

Ulrike ‘s beautiful bread with its elegant scoring,  Bnom’s lovely twist with hazelnuts and figs, Cathy’s carefully detailed step-by-step post is here,  and Lello‘s great midnight bread!

Next month we are baking Roast Potato Bread, Challah and maybe having a play with making Pretzels.

Cheese Bread with Parmesan and Pecorino

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One of the lovely things about baking along with a bunch of great people, all the amazing Mellow Bakers out there, is that if you wait and see what they make of a recipe before you bake it, you can learn from what they do. So if there is anyone who fancies making this bread, do scoot over to the forum and join in anytime or just pop over to see what we have been baking!

This is a lovely bread, another great recipe by Jeffrey Hamelman,  only one thing has caused a little discussion. The recipe calls for the cheese to be added part grated and part cubed. If you get pieces of parmesan on the outside of the loaf, or breaking through the skin they burn while the loaf is baking, apparently the taste is not good and the cheese tastes burnt and bitter.

The solution:  either poke all the cubes back into the dough or simply, grate all the cheese. I did the latter; I’ve never had much success with cheese breads before, the cheese always coagulating in little reformed plasticy pools inside the bread with great caverns above.  So though you can’t see the cheese in this bread, apart from the colour, you can certainly smell and taste it. Got the thumbs up from both Brian and Zeb  (who loves cheese almost as much as Wallace).

I used half and half Parmesan and Pecorino because that is what I had in the house and I prefer Pecorino anyway.

The bread is a simple white sourdough with a little commercial yeast added to speed up the proving process.  I reckon if you had any left over,  it would make brilliant golden croutons with French onion soup, the bread has olive oil in it as well as all that lovely grated cheese,  or on a Caesar salad, or fatoush, that is if you don’t just scoff the whole lot in one go!