An Attempt at the Fermented Potato Bread from Amass

Amass was a restaurant in Copenhagen that followed a zero waste approach and had some really creative dishes. Unfortunately, it closed in 2022, before I had the chance to go. Their fermented potato bread was one of their signature recipes and this is the story on how I tried to make it. Several things happened to remind me that this recipe exists: reading The Garden Chef which has recipes from Amass in it, an upcoming trip to Copenhagen and me having a few kilos of potatoes laying around.

On to the recipe, which I thought it would be straightforward as they published it on their website. What the journey to the final would product was going to be, I had no idea when I started. First, the simple part: cook the potatoes, peel them, then let them ferment with 2% salt. I left them to ferment at 30°C for 7 days. The original recipe said a minimum of 10 days, but I had to cut it short by a few days due to my schedule.

In the end the base ingredients were (scaled down proportionally from the orginal recipe):

• 558g potato fermented with 12g salt for 7 days
• 670g flour (type 550)
• 335g yoghurt
• 15g additional salt

I mashed the potatoes in the bag, mixed everything together in a stand mixer, and then put the mixture in the fridge. After around 20 hours, it seemed that the dough as not risen even a bit. Nevertheless, I went ahead and formed some 180g portions, hoping to achieve some rise. To emulate the grilling step in the original recipe, I heated a cast-iron pan and almost dry-fried them in there (I used some oil when shaping them into balls). This worked surprisingly well. After that they the bread got brushed with melted butter and put into a 200°C oven to finish cooking. As expected, the end result was a pretty dense flatbread.

Not really satisfied with the result I started to do a bit of research and noticed that they over the years shared three vastly different versions.

• One from 2015: a pretty thin and dense flat bread. This recipe I initially followed.
• One from 2017: a unfermented version published in the NYT.
• One published on Creme: which seems to be thicker and fluffy.

Going through the old pictures on Google Maps, social media and blog posts gives some clarity here. The old ones look quite flat, while from their Facebook in 2020 it looked quite fluffy and I found one from also from 2022 that was somewhat in between. There is also the post from Matthew Orlando in 2023 where he fries them in a pan. Also my shorter fermentation has probably an impact here.

In any case, I wanted a little bit more rise. How do you achieve that? Just add some yeast and hope for the best. That's exactly what I did. I kneaded around 5g of yeast into the dough, let it ferment at room temperature for a few more hours, then tried again. Voilà! I got some rise out of the bread after all.

Another issue was getting the timing in the oven right, as the original 5–6 minutes stated in the recipe were, of course, way off now. While you can bake bread at 200°C for long enough to brown it, this does not help with finding the exact timing. Technology to the rescue! Using a wireless thermometer, I timed it until the bread reached 95°C, which took around 13 minutes at a thickness of 2cm.

Note that when the bread was not fully cooled down, it was quite gummy. I noticed this phenomenon the last time I over-fermented dough containing baking malt. However, once it had cooled for a few hours, it was great and didn't go stale too quickly the next day either. I assume that moisture retention is better with cooked potato starch.

This first attempt was far from perfect, but the flavour is amazing and I learnt a few things on this odyssey. One of my go-to breads to bake is potato and onion bread. Maybe in the next step I will try combining these two ingredients. But that will have to wait at least another 10 days for a new batch of potatoes to ferment.