Potato Bread

Some of my favorite recipes are those that allow you to use up a bunch of food you have hanging around your house before it goes bad.  This week, I was trying to figure out how to use a bunch of russet potatoes aside from turning them into oven fries and hash browns.  I spent about a half-hour searching for ways to use a bunch of potatoes all at once until I remembered having potato bread a few years back at a potluck.  I decided to have a go at that, and for a first attempt it turned out pretty well.  Although Irish cuisine has capitalized on potato bread, there are a few other cultures that have their own take on it, including Hungarians, Germans and Peruvians.  In fact, potatoes were originally domesticated and cultivated in South America; European spins on potato bread are surprisingly recent in the big picture of history.

Potato breads require a portion of the wheat flour to be replaced by potatoes (duh, right?), but vary between recipes; some use yeast, some use baking soda, some are baked while others are pan-fried...essentially, there is no single perfect way to make potato bread.  The recipe I used came from the cooking blog More Than Burnt Toast.  I liked this particular recipe because it used baking powder instead of yeast for leavening which is a lot simpler and requires less prep time, although I made some changes in my own process.

First off, I didn't use cheese but nutritional yeast, an inactive yeast made from sugarcane that is often used by vegans and vegetarians as a cheese-flavor replacer.  One of my favorite uses is as a grated cheese substitute  over pasta.  Nutritional yeast is really great because it's loaded with protein and a bunch of essential minerals, and its got a great tangy flavor similar to strong cheeses.

I also ran my potatoes through my food processor instead of mashing them by hand and/or with oil.  This little tool currently ranks as my favorite kitchen appliance; it got the potatoes to the perfect creamy consistency that I wanted and didn't require fats to be added to the recipe.  Finally, I skipped the mustard powder and added fresh thyme to the final pre-beaten mixture (again, to use up as much fridge-clutter as possible in this recipe).

The results: The one thing I would have changed would have been to bake the bread longer at a slightly lower temperature to give it a slightly drier interior.  Overall, though, it turned out nicely with a great flavor and a really nice crust.  Sometime in the future I will attempt a yeast bread and write about the experience.