I was in a local bakery recently with a friend of mine and in browsing around, we found a packaged loaf of tomato bread. It looked wonderful. And in our usual manner, we looked at each other and said, “We can do that!” Now, usually that means we won’t ever do it, but wish we had. This time I was determined to go through with that ‘do’ phenomenon and actually make the Tomato Bread. dsc03137

    3/4 cup Canned diced Italian tomatoes in juice
    1/2 cup water
    2 Tbl Olive Oil
    2 1/2 Tbl sugar
    3/4 tsp salt
    3 1/2 cup bread flour
    2 1/4 tsp dry yeast

Combine juice and tomatoes and warm in microwave for 30 seconds. Add to machine (yes, I know…..) with other ingredients according to manufacturers instructions. Dough cycle.
After 5 minutes check and make sure dough is smooth round ball. Add liquid if too dry or flour if too wet. (Bet most of you know that already.)

Remove and let rise in warm place about 2 hours. Bake 375 for 25 minutes or until golden brown.dsc03126
So, How was it?? The loaf was lovely. The recipe was very easy. The tomato flavor was mild fleeting almost indiscernible and disappointing.

What would I do to change that? Next time I plan to add about 1/2 cup of chopped sun dried tomatoes, about 3/4 Tbl of Italian seasoning, and about 1 Tbl of tomato paste to the water/tomato mixture to make the same amount of liquid. The texture was nice,dsc03129 not great. I would like it to be rougher – more like a peasant bread.

Try it with some cheese and a good glass of red and you have a great meal. We did! (Thanks to my new food stylist – Johnnye.)