Thanks for the great advice, Susan! As promised, I am here to report the results of my experiment with adding mashed potatoes. Are you surprised to see me back so soon? I certainly wasn't going to wait until TOMORROW to try making this bread! After cooking up and mashing a pot of potatoes, I measured out 12 ounces by weight and dumped them into the big bucket. I stirred in 18 ounces of water, (24 - 6 = 18) plus the salt and yeast as directed. I decided to add 1 tablespoon of melted butter, because potatoes always go well with butter, right? Then I stirred in the 2 lb. bag of AP flour. There still seemed to be a lot of dry pockets of flour in the bottom of the bucket, so I added one more ounce of water (still by weight) for a total of 19. After stirring thoroughly the dough still looked pretty shaggy, but I have enough years of bread making experience to know that the flour will usually hydrate well if left to itself for a while, so I set the bucket aside for the first room temperature rise. As anticipated, the dough rose beautifully and from there I followed the instructions up to the shaping step. I pulled off about half the dough ball (around 1.5 pounds) and dumped it into a well-oiled 9" metal loaf pan. I squished the dough into the corners of the pan a little, dusted the top with flour, and let it rise again for about 75 minutes. I used the bottom half of my flat, square, metal broiler pan to make the steam and added BOILING water to the pre-heated pan. Note to self: next time, take off the glasses before creating a huge cloud of steam right in front of my face! I baked the bread for 20 minutes at 450 then turned the pan and baked for an additional 25 minutes at 400 until the internal temperature registered at 205 degrees. When it was done, I dumped the loaf out of the pan into the empty broiler pan and let it cool in the oven, and the crust on my bread was just as brown, crunchy and chewy as you could ask for. It was the perfect blend of a sandwich-shaped loaf and a quality artisan bread. I will report back one more time in a few days to let you know how well the dough keeps in the fridge, with the additions that I made of potatoes and a bit of dairy. It won't be more than 7 days from now, but it could be much less, depending upon how long I can be patient before the urge to bake the rest of the dough gets to be too strong. Boy, this bread is fantastic!

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