YEAST BREAD!

Well, now I'm going to take off my blogger cap and put on my analrapist stocking.
What?

Anyway. Made some really delicious rolls... Rosemary Potato Rolls, they have mashed potatoes in them! I used this recipe from someone else's blog "Two Peas and Their Pod" (that's a link to it in case you are so inclined...). I was at work and decided I wanted to make some bread and after browsing around on Food Gawker (that is also a link, prepare to be...amazed), I decided that in light of recently coming into some potatoes, I'd try them out. This recipe would make a lot more sense if you had some left over mashed potatoes you wanted to take care of, but I didn't so I just made about two potatoes worth of mashed potatoes. This recipe was delicious and made enough dough for two batches... go check it out!

Ingredients...

 

This is a fast and easy way of making mashed potatoes, cut them up little, boil them in salted water until they fall off a fork. Drain the potatoes and add them to a mixture of butter and milk or cream. Mix it together and finish it off with a fork to get the lumps out. Add more salt and pepper to taste. I didn't do so well with the "get the lumps out" part and had to pick large lumps of potato out of the dough... yum!

 

This is yeast. It's "ALIVE". I think that when it comes to cooking/baking, yeast is one of those things that people psych themselves out about. It really doesn't need to be scary though. As long as after about five minutes there are some bubbles, the li'l guys are alive and ready to make your bread rise to great heights...  (I'm so sorry.)

Step 1: Scald the milk. This is something that everyone should know how to do beacuse I know that I do it on a regular basis (a.ka. heat it to almost boiling). 

Step 2/3: Add butter, lard (crisco), eggs, yeast...

Step 4: Add mashed potatoes, flour, start to stir until lump forms...

Kate is awesome! Thanks!

 

This is a gif of me kneading bread. This bread wasn't too sticky and was pretty firm because of the mashed potatoes so it didn't need to be kneaded (lol??) for too long. I liked the tactile sensation, even the picking out potato lumps part. After it formed a nice lump, I put it into a lightly greased bowl and covered it loosely with plastic wrap. As to rising, my apartment is very cold so I turned my oven on to 150 for a few minutes, then turned the oven off and put the bread in the oven, giving it a nice, warm place to rise...

THEN I REALIZED that it would need at least three hours to rise and we were already pushing it pretty close to bed time, that's when I put the little dough ball to bed in the fridge, where it could rise slowly and be ready to bake the next evening...

goodnight!

The next morning before work I took the dough out, shaped it into little clovers as the recipe suggested and put it back in the fridge to rest...

Just put three little dough balls in each (greased) muffin tin.

Jealous?

You should be! These took a little while but were totally worth it. The vast majority of the time was waiting for the dough to rise. Having some mashed potatoes on hand would speed the process up considerably. They definitely needed butter since the dough had very little salt in it, next time I'll add some more. The best part? There was enough dough left over to freeze and I was able to pull it out and make another batch of rolls when a friend came over for dinner...