Tomato Bread from the Woodfired Oven
We love baking bread of all kinds in the woodfired oven and this tomato bread is a real winner. Full of flavour and a gorgeously light crumb – it’s perfect with soups, cheese, in sandwiches, toasted and any leftovers are awesome as croutons for salads.
David’s baking the tomato bread in our Bushman Santorini oven using just the retained heat, no fire or burning embers. This gives a really even heat so you shouldn’t get any scorched edges or burnt tops! If you have a metal style oven, like our Alfa or a Clementi or an Igneus, you can still cook the bread and David will talk you through how to do that in the video. And if you haven’t got an woodfired oven at all, just cook it in your regular oven at 220C.
We hope you like baking the bread; the recipe is here on our blog and the video is on our youtube channel here.
Ingredients
30g sundried tomatoes
2 ripe fresh tomatoes, roughly chopped
1/2 medium onion, peeled and chopped
1 level tsp dried oregano
1/2 level tsp freshly ground black pepper
2tbsp olive oil (or the oil from the jar of sundried tomatoes)
250g strong white flour
250g granary style flour (or wholemeal is fine too)
10g fine seasalt
5g quick acting dried yeast
225g warm water
Semolina
Oven state, equipment etc
4-5 Mississippi, no live embers in a refractory oven and a good bed of well burnt down embers and well heated floor in a metal oven
Heat deflector if using a metal oven to prevent side scorch from the embers
Dough scrapers – makes life with a sticky dough so much easier!
Method
- Heat the oil in an ovenproof pan and add the onion and both sets of tomatoes with the dried oregano and the black pepper. Cook in the oven with the lid on until the vegetables have completely softened and any liquid has reduced until the mixture is almost dry. Cool the mixture and blend until smooth with a hand blender.
- Mix the flours, salt and dried yeast in a large bowl and add the cooled tomato paste and the water. Mix to a soft sticky dough with a dough scraper before turning on to a clean work surface and kneading lightly to develop the gluten. Watch David in the video to see how he manages a soft sticky dough like this without adding any extra flour (which will dry out the finished bread).
- Put the dough back in a clean bowl and cover (we use another bowl). Leave the dough to rise in a warmish place for 2 hours until very well risen.
- Upend the bowl of dough to turn the dough out on to the work surface again and cut it into 2. Sprinkle plenty of semolina on the surface before shaping the dough to stop it sticking. Gently fold and shape the 2 pieces of dough into pavés as David does in the video. Cover and leave them to rise for 15 minutes.
- Make sure the oven door is on and the temperature is even in the oven. Put the 2 dough pavés into the oven, shut the door and bake for 20-25 minutes until well risen and the bottom thrumbs when tapped.
- Cool before eating if you can (!). The bread will freeze well so you can eat one and have one in the freezer or give one to a friend.