Mastering Stotties
A humble, pasty coloured bread that looked like a door stopper crossed with a hockey puck wrapped in plastic, it sat among the more colourful groceries and got paired with peas pudding and some ham sliced cold for grown up sandwiches. Nothing to attract a second glance in the dinner hall. It was just another bitter tasting, mass produced “vessel”, like another Northern character the Yorkshire Pudding - so it must be bland on its own.
Or so you would think, but challenging myself to make stotties meant learning a bit of history, and the birth of stotties, as we know them, began in our very own Grainger Market, Newcastle upon Tyne. These were baked in front of you, “just up from the Old Tripe Stand” as Dan Lepard writes in The Handmade Loaf. A man called Ian Gregg had an oven in the market, and he sometimes filled his daily baked stotties with potatoes.
Good white dough, infused with mashed potato would be baked on the floor of the oven by Ian’s bakers. The minutes ticked over as the smell of fresh meat and produce must have hung in the air, and the noise of neighbouring market traders called out their prices, until the dough got flipped over, to get the other side nice and brown.
It was many years before cast iron shelves were used in ovens, and until then we could only use the “floor” to bake on, and this is where, so they say, your Lancashire Muffins, Geordie Stotties, and other old fashioned breads came from. When I made stotties this month there were a few things to learn, especially with the addition of potato.
After using red skinned potatoes, I found brown skinned Russets gave me the fluffiest, starchiest mash. The high water content in the dough caused by the boiled and mashed potatoes means the stotties handle like focaccia, and require delicate, quick movements when kneading and shaping. In my research I got told to weigh the stotties down with another clean tray on top, but to get that all important sandwich shape I found the lightest silver foil tray I had worked best.
The high water content in the potato makes stottie dough handle like focaccia
My potato stotties have turned out to be a delicate, chewy, earthy sandwich bread that gets you full pretty quick, and they taste delicious on their own, with a nice resonance of potato in your mouth long after you have eaten one. As did my potato skins, which I fried and sprinkled with leftover chives for a midweek TV snack.
If you would like to order a pair of home baked potato stottie cakes for collection or delivery (if you live near me), please check out my order page.