Yeast breads

[Gummy-Bear]

In my cooking class in highschool, we made dough for yeast breads out of mashed potatoes. This got me wondering.... is it much of a difference using potatoes as a bread? And then when we set it out to rise, our teacher told us to put oil on it before refrigerating the dough.

My questions are:
1. What do the potatoes do for the dough?
2. Why do you oil the dough before setting it to rise?

[m brown]

did you add mashed potatoes to the bread dough or did you create a bread dough out of mashed potatoes and yeast?

Potoatoes have yummy starch for the yeast to comsume and create a lovely hearty texture.

[KYHeirloomer]

In addition to what M Brown said, potatoes also add moisture to the dough.

You did an overnight cold-rise approach? That's pretty state of the art for home baking. The chemical changes using that method are similar to those you get using Peter Reinhart's delayed fermentation approach. Won't bore you with the technical details but what happens is that the starches break down into sugars which feed the yeast.

Oiling the dough is so it doesn't dry out and get crusty while it sits. Usual approach is to oil or butter the bowl, turn the dough around in the bowl to coat it with the oil, then cover the bowl and let sit until the dough doubles in bulk.

Got a question for you: How did your bread turn out?

[Gummy-Bear]

We used the mashed potatoes with the yeast.
The moisture was my guess, pretty neat that that was part of what it was.

Our bread rose out more than up but then again we used a big pot for it to rise.

We made a large batch of dough because our "lab" or cooking experiment was over three days. The first day we made the dough. The second day (Today) we made pizza. And tomorrow we're making cinnamon rolls. The pizza turned out okay but it rose more in the oven so it was a lot of dough. It was decent. Thank you for your help, I was quite curious and fairly new to the baking scene.