Roasted Potato and Onion Bread

I saw this bread on a previous Yeastspotting and couldn’t resist it. Living In the Kitchen With Puppies had made a lovely looking loaf and I decided to emulate her.  I’m very happy with how it turned out, although I still need to work on making my crusts crispier. But it looks like bread one might pay for! The slashing worked well! The shaping looks good! And it tastes amazing. Can you tell I’m excited by the results?

I’m not going to rewrite the recipe as I didn’t do anything significantly different from Natashya, so I’ll just make some general comments about the recipe before I show a crumb photo.

The onions and potatoes I used were left overs from our Sunday roast and so the onions had been roasted in one piece rather than in small slices.  I then roughly chopped them, but I suspect the resultant onion pieces were larger than the recipe intended and also softer and less crispy.  The resultant dough was a bit wet though it did firm up after kneading.  Also, I did the kneading by hand rather than by machine which made adding the ferment pieces a bit fiddly.

But I would say it was worth it.  You can see the large onion pieces here:

Also, my stone has done its work well – this is the underside:

As usual, although the bread tastes good and the crust looks good, it isn’t all that crisp.  I did spray the oven with water when I put the loaves on the stone (on pieces of baking paper – so much easier than trying to use my improvised oven tray peel) but suspect it isn’t making enough steam.  I might revisit the pan of water in the bottom of the oven method.  The other possibility is I had the oven too high and a slightly lower temp would allow the crust to crisp up properly – but the inside seems done

Oh, and while I usually don’t miss butter all that much, I bet this bread would taste great spread with slightly cool salted butter.  Sunflower Pure was OK, but not really the same.

Submitted to Yeastspotting.