Dan Lepard's dill and potato bread recipe: It toasts beautifully.

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Dan Lepard’s dill and potato bread recipe: It toasts beautifully.

The writer and cook Rose Prince, author of the excellent Kitchenella (Fourth Estate, £26), has for the past few years been baking bread for friends each weekend. Starting on a Friday afternoon, the sourdough is mixed, then shaped in the evening and baked the following morning.

Rose’s children are involved in the whole production, too, from start to finish. As Rose writes, “If baking is to come back into domestic kitchens… it has to be practical” and involving the family in this way makes it eminently so. As does adapting a recipe so it fits the time you have, and so the bread stays soft enough to eat for many days.

Using sourdough helps stop the crumb going stale too quickly, but other ingredients have a similar effect. Potatoes, say, be they grated raw or cooked to a soft fluff, hold moisture in the bread dough, which means the crumb stays soft for longer after baking. However, the dough you make will depend to some extent on whether you use raw or cooked spuds. Cooked potato has an accelerating effect on yeast, because it is more easily fermentable, so mash makes yeast dough rise faster; while grated raw potato allows a slower and more flavourful rise. But raw potato needs more cooking time, so the brief heat a potato farl gets on the griddle means that cooked potato works best in that dough.

Dill and potato bread

This loaf has the most curious aroma once it’s baked, almost that of sizzling butter and very unlike that of fresh dill. You can tweak the recipe in various ways: we used ale for the liquid one week, and milk the next; replacing a quarter of the flour with spelt or wholemeal is good, too. This toasts very well and stays soft for days.

275ml warm water
1 teaspoon fast-action yeast
1 big handful chopped fresh dill
350g potatoes, washed but unpeeled
50ml olive oil, plus extra for kneading
550g strong white flour, plus a little extra for shaping
Just under 3 tsp salt

Pour the warm water into a bowl and stir in the yeast and dill. Grate the potatoes, mix into the bowl and stir in the oil, flour and salt. Mix well, leave for 10 minutes, then lightly oil a worktop and knead the dough for eight to 10 seconds only. Return the dough to the bowl, cover and leave for 90 minutes. Dust the worktop with flour, shape the dough into a ball, then place it seam-side down on a baking tray lined with nonstick paper. Cover and leave to rise for an hour.

Heat the oven to 220C (200C fan-assisted)/425F/gas mark 7, dust the loaf with flour, slash a crisscross into it and bake for 45 minutes.

Potato farls

The texture of these potato bread cakes is a bit like gnocchi – that is, slightly dense and sticky, but delicious. Using double the flour and a teaspoon of baking powder, with some milk to keep the dough soft, will give them a lighter but less typical texture. Either way tastes good, especially with fried bacon, eggs or black pudding.

550g potatoes, peeled
25g unsalted butter
1 tsp salt
About 100g plain flour, plus extra for rolling

Boil the potatoes in unsalted water until tender, then drain well and, while still warm, mash with the butter. Add the salt and flour, and gently mix to a soft dough, using more flour or adding a little milk, depending on how much moisture the potatoes have. Taste a little to check the salt.

Flour a worktop and roll the dough to a disc just over 1cm thick, or to a width that will fit in your frying pan or griddle. Cut the bread dough in quarters, called “farls”, and place these on the dry hot pan and cook for three to four minutes on each side, adjusting the heat so they’re brown and crisp but not burnt when you flip them.

danlepard.com/guardian

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