Sun dried tomato sourdough bread

There’s a new favorite bread in our house, and it was born out of a desire to use up the cherry tomatoes. I’m going to skip the narrative and get straight to the recipe.

Ingredients

3 cups bread flour
2 – 3 tbs sugar, depends on if you want the bread slightly sweet or not
1 tsp salt
2 tbs olive oil
1 cup sourdough starter
1 cup caramelized cherry tomatoes in olive oil or your choice of sun dried tomatoes in olive oil.

Directions

Starter
I’ve been making a quickie sourdough starter where  I combine 2 tsp bread machine yeast, 1 cup warm water, 1 tbs sugar, and 1 tbs of flour all in a quart jar and mixed well and covered. It can be ready within an hour, but the longer it sits (think at least overnight), the more sour it gets. If I don’t use it within a day, I either will feed it again with another 1 tsp of sugar and 1 tbs flour each every day or two and hour or more before using to reactivate the yeast. To keep the starter going and not have to add more yeast, mix up another cup of the batch sans yeast and combine it with the starter and feeding it every day or so. Then, use only half the starter next time you bake a loaf and replace it with new water, sugar and flour. Most recipes I’ve seen online call for 1 cup of flour for each cup of warm water, but I’m just substituting my “starter” for the water and yeast portion of a white bread recipe.

Caramelized Cherry Tomatoes
See post here: http://www.lovesown.com/2012/07/carmelized-cherry-tomatoes-in-olive-oil.html

Dough
Mix the dry ingredients together and add sour dough starter and olive oil. Once a ball has formed, kneed the dough until there is an even texture. If the dough is too sticky, add more flour one tablespoon at a time. Place the ball of dough in a large bowl and over with a damp towel and allow it to double in size. This should take about an hour, but you can also allow it to rise overnight, which only serves to improve the flavor. Sometimes I put the bowl in a warm oven that has been turned off.

Bread
Once the dough has doubled in size, punch it down and kneed it again. Stretch out the dough in the bowl and spread the 1 cup of tomatoes in oil over the top. Fold over the dough several times to work the tomatoes into the dough. If the tomatoes break through to the outer layer, pat down the loaf with another tablespoon of flour. Oil and flour a loaf pan, place the dough in the pan and allow it to rise 1/2 – 1″ above the rim of the pan. Again, this should take about an hour. Bake in an oven preheated to 350F for 45 minutes.