November 2, 2012 - 7:39am
Pan de Papa Chala Bread
Having the morning off today, I decided to finally start experimenting to try and reproduce Peruvian Potato bread. I had the pleasure of living in South America earlier this year, and have been wanting to try and reproduce the taste of real Peruvian bread ever since.
The only issue is every receipe I found online has a dairy product (butter/milk/etc...) as a central ingrediant, so I am doing some experimenting to come up with a non-dairy alternative.
Here is the receipe I am using:
1 Cup mashed potatoes
2 Eggs
1/2 Cup Vegitable Shortening
1/2 Cup Sugar
1 tsp Salt
1/2 Cup Warm Water
3 Cups white bread flour
2 Cups whole wheat flour
I'll post pics and update throughout the day to keep everyone updated on how it goes :)
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Ok, first - the prep!
I peeled two small potatoes, and then chopped them up:
I then boiled the potatoes in 3/4 cups of water - the reason I choose 3/4 cups is I wanted to use the boiled potatoe water for yeast culturing, as I find that yeast love it :o so mty hope was 1/4 cup of water would be absorbed by the potatoes / evaporated, and I would be left with 1/2 cup of "Potato water", which is what the original recipe calls for.
While I waited for the potatoes to boil, I began preparing the other ingrediants. I have a habit of mixing wet and dry ingredients separetely, so that's what I ended up doing here. I mixed 1/2 cup of Crisco, along with 1 table spoon of water, and the 2 eggs in one bowl (not pictured), and then the sugar, salt and flours in another:
Meanwhiles, my potatoes finished boiling - I drained out the water. It was too hot and could have killed the yeast, so I put it into the freezer to accelerate the cool down. Did the same thing to the potato mash to make sure it doesn't cook the egg by mistake (too impatient to just let it cool down naturally!).
After a few minutes in the freezer they had cooled down enough. I added the yeast to the potato water, and they grew FAST, almost creating a dough like structure in 3-4 minutes:
Then I added everything together to make the dough, and let the first rise occur. Its getting cold here, and again with the impatience I pre-heated the oven a little and let it rise in there isntead of on the counter:
Then I got side-tracked with some of my "real" work for about 1.5 hours. When I returned the first rise was done, and it was a fabulous success:
Anyways, need to get some more work done - will report back once the second rise / baking is complete to see if this experiement worked out!
It rose up the second time without difficulty -
noticing how much dough I had, I decided to make two loaves instead of one - one braided (traditional) chala, and one loaf of bread (I find the square shape is better for sandwiches and french toast, useful for a sunday morning!). Back into the warm oven for proofing:
After about 30 min they had inflated quite a bit, so time for some egg wash (I know not necessirly traditional Pan de Papa Technique, but then again neither is the braiding or the lack of dairy!)
And finally, the finishing touch - poppy seeds on the loaf and sesame seeds on the braided one.
Stay tuned for the finished product....!
My oven is quite hot, so I only baked these loaves for 27 minutes at 350f - the oven has hot spots so at around the ~15 minute mark I had to rotate both loaves. Aside from one of the braids coming loose, I'm pretty extact with their appearance - excited to try them tonight at dinner!
hope the taste was right, but I think that you might find the potatoes are different here than in Peru, I have seen a documentary on how they grow them and store them, and it seems to me they would be sweeter than the ones here, maybe I am wrong, but if I treated my potatoes like those were, they would be slightly frosted and as a result sweeter.
Not to mention the potato varieties would be different to US/Canadian types.
But the bread looks wonderful, and my mother never used any milk in her bread and it was great! She didn't buy milk as it went bad before it ever got used up, as both my brother and I are allergic to milk (lactose intolerant) so she didn't use it in breads or most baking, she always said she made French bread because it had no milk.
Very true that the potatoes are going to be different , which will likely affect the taste - one interesting thing is the potato bread seems to stay softer and fresher for longer than other loaves I've made. I wonder why?
Do you remember what the Peruvian potatoes looked like? There are 3 basic categories of potatoes: Russets (white or creamy interior, thicker/rougher brown skin), Whites (white interior, thin skin), and Reds (white interior, thin skin). You can store potatoes in cold temperatures to increase their sweetness, or bring them to room temperature to make them less sweet and more starchy, or back to the cold to become sweet again. See http://www.kimberly.uidaho.edu/potatoes/CIS1153.pdf. I would imagine that if you got the basic potato category right based on what you saw in Peru, then stored them in a similar fashion to enhance sweetness or starchiness appropriately, that you could come closer to what their potatoes taste like. I think it only takes a week and a half or so for the flavor to change as a result of storage temperature. We store our home grown potatoes at around 35-38 F in the corner of our garage where it stays cold all winter (in light-proof boxes of straw ...small potatoes in shoeboxes inside the big boxes since they turn into 'runaways' and get lost too easily).
Brian
Peruvian Bread not have dairy in it? I'm not familiar with it to know. Or are you making it that way because of intoleran orallergy to dairy? Dairy is pretty hard to replace in a breaqd recipe.
Correct - replacing Dairy because of lactose intollerance in my family. Depending on the receipe, I usually have success using Soya,Coconut or Almond milk as a replacement.
are good choices for dairy replacements. Would soy have more protein? I'm going for some tofu, coconut water, green curry bread pretty soon to try to get rid of some of the carbs and to help give Ian and myself to a lesser degree, our scientific oddity bread fix. Will have to come up with some gluten free flour too - to hold it together and thought soy flour might be the best choice as far as protein goes.
I am not sure why the bread is softer longer, but I do know that using potato water in the bread or all or part of the moisture makes it different too! So maybe its something in the chemical content.
The other is I just read somewhere or heard somewhere that soy milk isn't as good a replacement for cows milk as it might seem for the lactose intolerant, since apparently the protien molecule is so similar as to cause problems, which explains why I am apparently allergic to soy milk as well! I think I would go for the coconut milk if I were replacing the dairy, as it does have good things going for it and the soy isn't as good as one might think.
I don't like the taste of soy, and have always disliked the way it made me feel as much as drinking "real" milk, but oddly enough I can drink goats milk, although they claim its the same as cows milk, it really isn't, and since getting it fresh is impossible, I buy it from the supermarket.The only problem is actually using it, because I don't use dairy due to the lactose intolerance, I am not into using the milk up so it goes to waste!
Eva,
Not sure if you can buy powdered goat's milk (Meyenberg brand) but that is what I use in my breads. Stores just like cow's powdered milk and I can get it at my local grocery store - a health food type of store. I know it can be bought online too.
Janet
have never seen that anywhere, but I can ask at my local health food store, they can get me some unusual things. I dont' know why I never thought to ask, as you can get dried buttermilk powder and I do have that! I also have dried eggs, and egg whites, which don't have any other ingredients.
I like to make my own baking mix, or pancake mixes and cut out the middle man! Its simple enough to do.
Good Luck :-)