Leftover Mashed Potato Sandwich Bread

A subscriber-exclusive recipe

Well I had a few other things in the hopper for this week, but the bug I caught (still not COVID) has lingered longer than I’d hoped, so I’ve gotten behind. In the meantime, here’s that leftover mashed potato bread I mentioned earlier. Hopefully you still have leftover mashed pots—at this point, this might be the best use for them—but if not, I figure we are in prime mashed potato season, so there will likely be more soon.

The goal for this bread was to use up as much mashed potato as possible in a single loaf. I tried 100% (meaning equal parts flour and mashed potatoes), and though the dough seemed fine, the resulting loaf collapsed something awful after baking. I reduced it down to 30%, which is still a respectable amount, and in line with most of my other cooked-starch sandwich breads. It’s definitely enough to give the bread a moist, tight crumb, and excellent longevity.

This recipe also utilizes my new approach to enriched breads, which is to skip just about every trick I know for increasing dough development, including the autolyse. It does get mixed in a machine, but moderately, only enough to create a smooth, still somewhat sticky dough. As with all of my enriched formulas, a chilling step makes the dough easy to handle, despite the stickiness when warm.

I did include a step for adjusting the amount of milk in the dough to accommodate mashed potatoes of varying consistencies, but you might want to err on the side of too much liquid than too little, if you are unsure about how the dough should feel at the end of mixing.

Find the recipe below the fold, and I’ll be back on Friday at the latest with more bready goodness. Hit me up with questions or necessary corrections, my brain is on DayQuil right now and it’s possible I may have missed something.

Also: I have just added the option to ship my starter stirrers internationally, if you wanted to order them. I’ve only got 40 left for now, so don’t wait, especially if you want to give them as gifts this year.

—Andrew