Made a loaf of bread in the machine yesterday. Potato bread sounded good, and I’ve never done it with a potato rather than with instant flakes (though to all bread machine owners: about 1/3 cup of instant flakes subbed out for 1/2 cup of your flour makes an incredibly soft and delicious loaf). Anyway, we didn’t have any potatoes but we had SWEET potatoes, so I thought I’d try and see what would happen.
The bread is a beautiful orange color, but the texture is a bit strange and the loaf collapsed, a symptom, I’m told, of too much moisture in the dough and not enough gluten.
This makes me curious how a sweet potato differs chemically from a potato that would cause it to absorb less liquid or react with the yeast differently.
I then went searching for answers: I found nothing conclusive, but this person was making potato yeast rolls and was recommended to use a higher-starch variety of potato; Texas A&M University’s agriculture page suggests that sweet potatoes are higher in starch than an Irish potato (same as a white potato?). So that’s not the culprit.
In conclusion, I’m not sure what caused the lack of rise and odd texture, but next time I make sweet potato bread, I’ll try doing the mixing at least, and maybe the baking, without the machine, so I can get a good gauge of how wet the dough is.
And I’m using this recipe, because WOW.
