Potatoes?

Last week was potato bread week. For reasons unknown, even to me, I made potato bread two days in a row. I made the first two potato bread recipes listed in The New Complete Book of Breads : Sister Jennie’s Potato Bread (p 360) and Potato Bread (p 363).\par
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My conclusion? The crust of Sister Jennie’s Potato Bread was a lovely golden brown, and the texture was softer than normal white bread. However, it has 1/2 cup of sugar in it, which made it noticeably sweeter than most regular white breads. If you like your white bread sweet, that’s great, but I think my tastes have been changing with the lean breads I’ve been attempting, and the bread was more sweet than I would’ve liked. So the next day I used my leftover mashed potato and reserved potato liquid and made the next recipe called simply “Potato Bread.” It called for the dough to be made into two different shapes: one regular loaf, and one braided loaf. (Judah asked yesterday morning if he could have some of that “pretty bread” so I felt vindicated in having gone to the extra effort to shape it more elaborately, even though I considered skipping that step) I don’t know exactly how it would’ve turned out had I made it correctly. Unfortunately, although it called for only 2 T. sugar, I forgot to put any in at all, and the salt flavor predominated. Interestingly, the crust was much, much, lighter than the first loaf with the higher sugar content. Even without the sugar, I think I liked the regular Potato Bread better, since it wasn’t as sweet, but at this point my decision on potato bead is this:\par
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The potato might change the crust and the texture a little, but it doesn’t add or detract much from the flavor of the bread. I really couldn’t take a bite and tell you whether it had potato in it or not. And in that case, why go to the trouble of cleaning, cutting up, boiling, skinning, and mashing the potatoes? But you never know. Perhaps the next recipe in the book “Potato Starter White Bread” will change my mind.