Another excellent recipe of Dan Lepard’s, from ‘Short and Sweet – The Best of Home Baking’. I must have now done about 30% recipes from this great book and you know what? Not one dud.
Quite a few of them make you think what? it’s never going to work, FAR too much spice and once the mix is made it doesn’t remotely look like it can bake into anything tasty. But it does, invariably – like this bread. Onions and mash – hey, that’s dinner not bread, only sausages are missing, no? As it turns out the mashed potatoes make bread moist and cohesive so it slices wonderfully even when still warm.
Onions work well too, the flavour is excellent, perhaps too oniony when the bread is very fresh but it settles down when cold. If you’re not too keen on a strong waft of onions when about to tuck into a sandwich, reduce the amount and add more potatoes – so that you have in total about 150g of onions and mash together.
This is a perfect loaf for salt beef or pastrami sandwiches. Chop up some gherkin on top and mazel tov! the taste right out of a good New York deli.