Sweet Potato Bread

My friend Casey made some homemade ice cream. Even more exciting than the fresh ice cream is its main ingredient: sweet potatoes! After a visit with her this morning, I am the lucky recipient of all of her leftover pureed sweet potato. The internet has shown me that there are many websites dedicated to recipes for leftovers. I think a lot of this is directed towards holiday cooking when we might use things like pumpkin pie filling, cranberries, and in my case sweet potatoes, and then have the remnants that no one wants to eat a couple days later.

And so here I am making bread again. After my modestly successful Honey Oat Bread I guess I am feeling pretty awesome. Awesome enough to attempt a braided bread recipe. How fancy.

The initial mixing was beautiful:
In the bowl is soy milk, honey, pureed sweet potato (with a little yam for coloring), dried thyme, yeast, water and oil.


The next step was adding the liquids to the dry stuff: flours, salt, and some corn meal.

I kneaded the dough to the desirable soft-but-not-sticky consistency and let it rise for 1.5 hours next to my radiator. After doubling, I separated the dough into 6, foot long "ropes" and braided two loaves. They rose for another hour until they were very plump.

In the end they only needed to cook for 35 minutes in the oven until they were golden brown and had that hollow sound when tapped on the bottom. The hollow sound is still something of a mystery to me. I can probably convince myself that any sound coming from the bottom of my loaf sounds "empty". The sweet potato is hardly noticeable in the final product; I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but the bread turned out wonderful and even better, beautiful. Braided loafs are great because I get to play with the dough more than I normally would. Imagine the fun shapes my imagination can create! Circles, spiral buns, tricolors!

Warmed and slathered with Earth Balance this bread is a great morning treat.