[food] sourdough potato bread

[kaberett]

Cheerfully adapted from The Perfect Loaf, which is a fantastic resource. (I might at some point even follow the recipe and process as given.)

Ingredients
250g potatoes, baked
350ml water
100g starter
350g strong white flour
100g strong wholemeal
~5g rosemary (!)
2 generous tbsp nigella
another 25ml water + 10g salt

Process notes
Bake the potatoes in advance, ideally when the oven is on for something else anyway. When they are cool enough to handle, puree them with the water; then proceed as normal.

(If anyone would like me to, I can expand on this at a point that isn't bedtime, but I want the quantities somewhere convenient rather than having to keep cross-referencing with the spreadsheet I used to scale them down!)

Comments

[watersword]

If/when your energy allows, I'd love the details! (Do you peel the cooled potatoes or puree them with the jacket? When you say "puree" do you mean like with a blender, or "mash to smooth" or ...?)

[kaberett]

(Annoyingly the convenient reference URL I had for the Leiths How to Cook... Bread section on sourdough, which is What I Do, has evaporated into thin air and was not picked up by archive.org -- I am intending to reply with actual details Real Soon Now!)

[kaberett]

RIGHT hello yes. As I say: convenient link With Pictures is no more (here is where it was) and alas it was never archived by the Wayback Machine.

"As normal":

1. Whisk 100-150g of active starter into the puréed potato-water mix, using a fork, usually the fork I used the last time I fed the starter.
   
2. Dump in the rest of the ingredients except the additional water and salt. Whisk (ish) again with the fork; the dough will be pretty craggy and lumpy at this step, but that is fine -- just make sure there aren't any pockets of totally dry flour left.
   
3. Cover with a tea towel/misc bit of cloth/etc and leave to autolyse & begin fermentation: 30 minutes minimum, but you can get away with much longer if you're alright with your bread not coming out perfectly predictably consistent.
   
4. Mix the additional 25ml of water with the salt. After the proto-dough has sat and thought for at least 30 minutes, dump the water-and-salt solution (salt is probably not very dissolved) over the dough.
   
5. Now perform the first stretch-and-turn. This is the part where the photos were most helpful to me. :| But: from more-or-less underneath, grab a handful of dough, stretch it up into the air a little, and fold it over the top. Rotate the bowl 90ish degrees and repeat. Spend 30ish seconds on this (once or twice around), then cover the bowl and go away again.
   
6. Repeat the stretch-and-folds at intervals of at least 10 minutes (I usually go longer and It's Fine -- less repeatable/consistent results, but Fine), 6-10ish times in total, by which point the dough should be getting fairly smooth and elastic. (This is less true with whole grains, rye, and other low-gluten/lots-of-bits-in flours.)
   
7. Extricate the dough onto a floured board. Go round once more, at actually 90 degree intervals, folding bits into the middle "like an envelope" (says the book), then flip the ball of dough over and leave it to rest on the board for ~20 minutes, covered with the same tea towel or functional equivalent.
   
8. Flour banneton or proving basket/bowl, and put in any seeds/wheat flakes/etc you'd like the bread to have as a hat. Transfer dough into it, seam side up, and cover again.

At this point I think the book says to leave it for ~90 minutes and then bake, or Longer In The Fridge; ours tend to go in the fridge overnight and get baked first thing in the morning.

For baking: heat oven to ~220degC (we have an iron griddle, flat on one side, that we leave in the oven to use as a baking stone). Once it's up to temperature, boil a mugful or so of water in a kettle. When the kettle is boiled, open up the oven, get out the griddle, pour the hot water into a roasting tray or similar in the base of the oven, and close the oven again. Invert the proving basket over the griddle, encouraging the dough to let go if necessary. Once the dough is on the baking surface, score the top of the loaf according to your desired form of creative expression. Return baking surface plus dough to oven for 30-35ish minutes. Once done, remove and ideally leave to cool swaddled in a tea towel for 30 minutes to 1 hour, but A likes Extremely Fresh Bread so it normally only gets 10 in this household.

If you want more consistent results, The Perfect Loaf goes into excruciating detail and separates out some of the steps that Leiths/I have collapsed!