Savory Pull-Apart Bread with Wild Garlic
·Boil the potatoes
Peel the potatoes, cut them into small pieces and boil in unsalted water until completely tender. Once cooked, keep 100 ml of the hot potato water and drain the rest.
Let it cool
Let the potatoes cool slightly, then blend or mash them until smooth. Let the potato water cool down too, until it's just lukewarm — about the same temperature you'd use to activate yeast in milk.
Make the yeast starter
Stir the sugar into the lukewarm water and crumble in the yeast. Once bubbles start forming on the surface, the starter is ready.
Make the dough
Put the mashed potatoes, 150 g of flour and the yeast starter with the potato water into a bowl. Mix together and let rise for twenty minutes. Then add the egg, the remaining flour, salt and soft margarine. Work into a soft, non-sticky dough. It may still be a touch sticky at this stage — that's fine.
Let it rise
Cover with a tea towel and leave to rise in a warm place for an hour. The dough should noticeably increase in size and become light and airy, full of little bubbles. Towards the end of the rising time, prepare the filling.
Make the filling
Finely chop the wild garlic. Grate the cheddar finely. Dice the shallot into small pieces. Melt the margarine.
Roll out the dough and sprinkle with filling
Turn the risen dough out onto a floured surface and roll into a rectangle roughly 35 x 45 cm. Brush with the melted margarine, then sprinkle over the wild garlic, shallot and grated cheddar.
Cut in half
Cut the rectangle lengthwise into two halves.
Roll up towards the cut edge
Roll each half into a log, rolling towards the center — i.e. towards the cut edge.
Slice into pieces
Cut each log into pieces about 6 cm wide.
Seal the edges
Grease a round baking tin with a little margarine. Neatly tidy up each sliced piece from the log — just as you would when shaping filled yeast buns — and seal both cut sides with dough.
Brush with melted margarine
You should now have neat little buns. Brush them all over with the remaining melted margarine left over from brushing the dough.
Arrange in the tin
Arrange the buns in the round tin, nestled snugly side by side. Once they're all in place, brush the surface with the rest of the melted margarine. Bake in an oven preheated to 200 °C for 25 minutes.
Tip:
These savory bites are delicious on their own, but they also make a wonderful accompaniment to, say, a spring egg spread with wild garlic.
