White Bread 101

It is no secret that I love cookbooks and looking for new recipes. One ingredient that I keep seeing in my searches of KAF recipes is potato flour. The only place I have seen it for sale is in the KAF baker's catalog. Then I thought that maybe this was something that comes out once a year in the Kosher section with the rest of the Kosher for Passover stuff. I know that potato stuff is ok to use in passover baking but what I was seeing is potato starch.

I was wondering if Potato Starch and Potato Flour were the same thing but called something different. A bunch of internet searches I did said pretty much that but I still wasn't 100% sure. I contacted the King Arthur Flour's baker's hotline via their online chat to see what they could tell me about starch vs flour.

I asked if potato starch was the same thing as potato flour and this is the answer I got: no, they are a bit different. Potato flour is processed including the peels of the potatoes, potato starch doesn't include peels, just potato flesh.

I then asked if I used starch instead of flour would this effect the recipe: they behave slightly differently in recipes as well...partly it depends on the amount, but if you use starch instead of flour, your texture will be different, not as tender, a bit stiffer.




White Bread 101
King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion

3 cups (12 3/4 oz) all purpose flour
2 teaspoons instant yeast
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
3 tablespoons (1 1/4 oz) sugar
4 tablespoons (2 oz) butter
1/4 cup (1 1/2 oz) nonfat dry milk
1/4 cup (1 1/2 oz) potato flour, or 1/3 cup (3/4 oz) potato flakes
1 1/8 cups (9 oz) lukewarm water

Combine all the ingredients and mix and knead them together - by hand, mixer or bread machine - until you've made soft, smooth dough. Adjust the dough's consistency with additional flour or water as needed; but remember, the more flour you add while you're kneading, the heavier and drier your final loaf will be. Cover and let the dough rise for 1 hour,until it's puffy (though not necessarily double in bulk).

Transfer the dough to a lightly greased work surface and shape it into an 8-inch log. Transfer the log to a lightly greased 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch loaf pan, cover the pan (a proof cover works well here), and let the bread rise until the outer edge has risen about 1 inch over the rim of the pan, about 1 hour.



Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Uncover the pan and bake the bread for 35 to 40 minutes, tenting it lightly with aluminum foil for the final 10 to 15 minutes if it appears to be browning too quickly. Remove the bread from the oven, take it out of the pan, and place it on a wire rack to cool completely. A fter 15 minutes, brush it with butter, if desired, this will give it a soft crust.




Review: I have to confess that I used the potato starch because I thought it was the same as flour. I contacted KAF after I made the bread because the answers i got online just did not seem right to me. I thought the bread came out great but I did not use a lot of it in the starch in the recipe so maybe it didn't change the texture that much.

This recipe is super easy to make especially if you use the bread machine to do all the kneading. I really love recipes where you just throw all the stuff into the mixer/machine and let it do the work. One reason I made this bread so I can make the next recipe in the book which is for Herbed Monkey Bread...I think that would be perfect for any Italian dinner coming up.

My crumb shot...