Do you ever stare at random ingredients and wonder what would happen if you tried to incorporate them into a recipe you've made before? Just me? Having unsucessfully attempted to find a (published) recipe that would use sweet potato as part of a yeasted loaf, I decided to create my own. This is bread, it isn't sweet - it's just that I used a sweet potato!
Yeasted Sweet Potato Bread
Ingredients
350g strong white bread flour
1 tsp instant yeast
1 tsp salt
1 smallish sweet potato (mine weighed 130g before peeling)
200-250ml warm water
Method
- Peel the sweet potato and chop into little pieces. Microwave with a splash of water (or steam it) until tender.
- I was intending to mash the potato with a fork but it wasn't happy with this, so I blitzed it with about 100ml of the water until it formed a smooth puree using a handheld stick blender.
- Mix the flour, salt, yeast, sweet potato puree and remaining water in a large bowl. You want a fairly soft dough. Leave for a few minutes to start the process of the flour absorbing some of the water.
- Knead briefly. Leave for a while. I got distracted so don't know how long this was, maybe 30-45 minutes.
- Knead briefly again and leave again. The dough grew a lot!
- Knock back gently and then leave to relax again for about 10 minutes. Grease a 2lb loaf tin.
- Pat the dough out to a rectangle and roll up tightly. Squash it down into the tin, cover and leave to increase in size.
- I don't think mine took very long, perhaps 30 minutes or so, but it will depend on the temperature of your kitchen and so forth.
- Preheat the oven to gas 7/220C. Flour and slash the loaf. Bake for 8 minutes, turn the heat down to Gas 6/200C and bake for a further 25 minutes. Turn out of the tin, return to the oven upside down and allow the base of the loaf to brown for about 10 minutes.
- Allow to cool on a wire rack.
This has to be one of the softest, lightest white (well, pale orange really!) loaves I've ever made! The crust was never crunchy - I guess the sweet potato prevented this, and the crumb is superlight and supersoft. Although I can't taste the sweet potato in the final loaf (I wasn't really expecting to) the colour is definitely there - the bread is a beautiful shade of orange! I think this would be perfect for children - the bread is easy to make, and really soft and pleasing to eat. It wouldn't be my bread of choice all the time - I do really, really enjoy a chewy crunchy crust on my loaf, and a sturdier crumb, but this one does have a place in the repertoire of breads I've made.
I think it would make a perfect family loaf so I'm going to share this with Family Friendly Fridays, being hosted this month by Clare of The Vegetarian Experience and founded by Ren of Fabulicious Food.
5 comments:
I was excited at the thought and I can imagine how many non yeasted sweet potato bread your search would throw up - I find the same thing with a zucchini or banana bread - both of them are interesting in yeasted breads but so hard to find for all the quickbreads. This sounds lovely. I think there are a few pumpkin breads about and you could probably sub sweet potato for the pumpkin in those (I do this quite regularly in recipes)
Wow that looks fab and I love the orange hue the sweet potato has given it. I bet ti would taste fab with some nutella!
Hi Caroline
I have entered your sweet Potato bread into the linky on my blog for you as I know you were having trouble. I think that this recipe looks fab - Thanks so much for entering Family Friendly Fridays!! Clare x
Caroline, now you're making up your own bread recipes as well as cake ones? How fantastic this loaf looks - it's the first one I've ever seen for sweet potato bread too! :)
Johanna - I hadn't really thought about searching for pumpkin/squash loaves. I bet there are plenty about. I also hadn't really considered courgettes or bananas in a yeasted loaf - an interesting proposition!
Katie - it's a pretty colour, a bit different from normal white bread!
Claire - thanks for entering it, I don't know why I couldn't get the linky to work!
Celia - it didn't take too much imagination to make this one up - there are many lovely challenging bread recipes I'd like to try! Thank you for your lovely comment!
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