Growing up, we baked a lot of our own bread – well, actually, I baked it, which was not a good thing. I HATED kneading bread, so I never did enough, and consequently, my bread almost never turned out nice – it was usually a pretty heavy loaf of bread!
That dislike has been so ingrained in my psyche that I have avoided baking bread unless I could do it in a bread machine. Then this weekend I came across a recipe for Potato Sour cream Chive Rolls. Nah, it’s too much work, even if it does look really good…. Then yesterday, the baking bug hit me, and those rolls just kept nagging at me “Make me, make me, make ME!” So I did. And you know what, kneading wasn’t half bad!! And the rolls are exceptional, and not as hard to make as they look.
And of course I modified. For one thing, the recipe made 24 rolls or 2 loaves of bread, according to the author. But with 6 cups of flour, I’m thinking those would have been BIG loaves of bread. We have trouble using up one loaf of bread, so I intended to half the recipe. Now since you can’t really measure mashed potatoes before they are cooked and mashed, that kind of tweaked my recipe, because I ended up with closer to 1 c mashed potatoes than the ¾ c that would have halved the recipe. Then of course if you’re doing mashed taters, and sour cream and chives…. You HAVE to have onion, so I added a diced, carmelized onion to the recipe.
The raising process for yeast bread has always been an issue for me – I don’t keep my house very warm during the winter, and yeast doesn’t respond well to that. The stove that we have now has a vent from the oven right at the back of the stove, so I turned the oven on to its lowest setting and put the dough in front of that vent – voile, it actually doubled in size!!!
The rolls turned out to be really nice and light, with a nice crust fresh out of the oven, and a nice soft roll once cooled and bagged.
Potato Onion Rolls
1 cup cooked potatoes (mashed)
1/3 c. low fat milk
2 TBS butter
¼ c fat free sour cream
¾ + ¼ tsp salt
1 small onion finely diced
1/3 c chives, chopped
1 egg
1 ½ tsp yeast
1 + 1 + 1 c flour
Cut the potatoes up (leave peels on) and put in a pan and just cover with water. Add ¼ tsp salt. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a low boil until soft.
While the potatoes are cooking, put the diced onion in a pan with 1 tsp olive oil. Cook the onions over high heat until brown and cooked through.
Pour off any extra water and put potatoes, sour cream, milk, butter and salt in a bowl. Use a mixer to beat the potato mixture until smooth.
Add onions, chives, sugar and egg and mix well. Ensure that the batter is warm, then add yeast. Add 1 c flour and mix. Let mixture rest for 10 minutes.
Mix in remaining flour until dough is stiff enough to be difficult to mix (approx. 1 cup). Put dough on floured surface and knead remaining flour into dough. Continue kneading dough until it is smooth and elastic, approximately 8-10 minutes.
Lightly oil a bowl and put dough in, turning to coat all sides with the oil. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise until double in size, approximately 1 hour.
Remove plastic and punch dough down. Pour out onto a lightly floured surface and cut or divide into 8 equal parts for larger rolls or 12 for dinner sized rolls. Lightly form the pieces into rolls and place on a baking sheet covered with wax or parchment paper. Sprinkle tops of rolls lightly with flour and allow to rise again until double, about 1 hour.
Preheat oven to 350F.
Put sheet in oven and bake for 25-30 minutes.