I love rice, and I love the taste of a good tangy potato bread, so I decided after much experimenting and thought to post it. The original recipe was from James Beard's Beard on Bread. I added the rice elements of it and made a few additional variations and notes.

Time: Set a day aside for yourself. It will take about 6 hours or more. This is a good weekend project.

Materials:

Cutting board
Skillet or glass pie pan
Oven
Knife
Measuring tools

Ingredients:

3 cups mashed potatoes (they can be yukon, fingerlin, red, or purple. Baking potatoes will not have good flavor.) 1 package dry active yeast.
1/2 cup warm water
2 cups warm milk or buttermilk
2 lbs unbleached all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tbsps salt
1 tsp sugar
2 cups Nishiki or short grain rice.
Optional Crunchy topping
1 cup cooked Nishiki rice.
3 cups of buttermilk.
butter
oil
egg

Scrub the potatoes and bake them until tender. Separate the peels from the potatoes. Mash the potatoes while still warm, if they aren't creamy, that's fine. Allow the potatoes to cool and in a food processor roughly chop the peels of the potatoes (optional). Add to cooling potatoes and incorporate.

Dissolve the yeast in 1/2 cup of warm water, mix well w/ 3 tbsps of the flour in a large bowl, and let this starter "rise" for 30 minutes.

Add 2 cups of warm buttermilk, sugar, salt, rice, remaining flour and the mashed potatoes, and mix well. Turn out on a floured board and knead until the dough is elastic and supple and has great life in it, about 12-15 minutes. Shape the dough into a ball.

Oil a bowl, put the dough in it and turn the dough to coat w/oil. Place in a warm draft-free spot for 1-2 hours or when it rises to double in bulk. While the dough rises, combine 1/2 cup short grain rice with some of the buttermilk. Let the rice soak up the buttermilk and add more buttermilk gradually until a rice-pudding-like consistency is achieved. Remove the dough and punch down and knead for 4-5 minutes. Shape into a large round loaf and place in a buttered 12 inch oven proof skillet with round sides, gently press the buttermilked rice mixture into the top of the loaf. Cover all top sides.

Let rise for about 30-35 minutes.

Brush loaf with water or a diluted scrambled egg and then make a deep incision in the form of a cross in the center. Bake it in a preheated oven at 400 degrees for 1-1 1/4 hrs or until nicely brown and sounds hollow when tapped with knuckles.

Variations:

- If you use purple potatoes the bread will be colorful and fun for kids.

- If you like denser bread, let rise for an hour on the second rising, instead of half an hour.

- You can add more salt if you like. Up to a tablespoon is fine. To make the bread heartier, you can substitute 1/2 of the wheat flour for potato flour. This will significantly raise the amount of taste of the potatoes.

- Substituting half of the milk/buttermilk for yogurt in the dough will make the dough taste tangier (1 for 1 ratio).