Mashed Potato Rolls
Is this the ultimate sandwich bread?
I had some of the pommes écrasées left over (if you haven’t made those yet, why not?) so I thought I’d take a stab at using them to make potato rolls, something along the lines of my purple sweet potato rolls but slightly different, leaning into the olive oil and herb combination in the mash. I imagined something about halfway to an enriched bread—soft but not brioche-fluffy—with a lovely herbal component based on the character of those splendid spuds. The result landed in a very sweet spot somewhere between potato rolls, milk bread, and sandwich rolls.
Something you should know about me: I find inspiration in limitations, and if you set a goal of not wasting food then every day is an opportunity to think creatively about what you already have and where you want to take it that’s new and different. A lot of food writers have content calendars with recipes tied to holidays and such, and often their recipes are mostly for existing dishes that don’t relate to each other at all, or to the rhythms of the writer’s life. That’s fine, I guess, but to me it often comes off as generic. I write about what I cook for myself, and a lot of times that involves taking the leftovers or byproducts from one dish and using them in another—inventing and improvising as I go. It’s a continuum, a practice. It’s a more personal way of cooking, which I think makes it more interesting.
This approach also accomplishes three things:
It reduces the amount of food you waste. By a lot.
It makes your food deeper and more interesting, because you’re using fully seasoned components and trying combinations you haven’t used before.
It makes you a much better and more confident cook, because you learn how to adapt recipes and techniques to fit the requirements of a given situation rather than starting from scratch (and a set recipe) every time. That’s real cooking.
Not all of what I do here involves leftovers—not by a long shot. But the Venn diagram of the things I want to teach you and the three things listed above is a circle. Real cooking! All the cool kids are doing it. You should join us on the elite tier, where the real knowledge (like this excellent method) gets dropped.
The beauty of this recipe is that whatever form your mashed potatoes take—whether you crushed them with olive oil and herbs as in pommes écrasées or whether you beat in butter, milk, and/or cream or even cheese, these rolls will work, and they will be mighty. As I mentioned, they’re not ridiculously squishy. Let’s call them medium-soft: they’ve got an identity, and they can withstand some drippy burger juices or muffuletta-style toppings with aplomb. And they have flavor, too, which I look for in my food. You can also bake this dough in a loaf pan to produce perfectly bouncy slices for all manner of sandwiches. What’s not to love?
