Spiral Loaf

This months Fresh From The Oven challenge was to share our favourite savoury bread recipe. ‘Something for picnics, summer sandwiches or barbecues.’

I must admit, the focaccia I often make for those sort of affairs starts as a packet of ciabatta mix. It gets punched and pounded and doused with herby olive oil and sundried tomatoes. But using bread mix is perhaps not in keeping with the FFTO ethos.

So today I created this.

It’s not particularly big and it’s certainly not clever but it’s a loaf that would make any sandwich a bit more interesting with its spicy tomato swirls.

It’s so pretty I plan to make this again with some other colours and flavours. I think I have seen something similar using the ubiquitous green tea powder, but that’s far too fashionable for me to have in stock. Perhaps a chocolate version would work well.

It is a simple concept, I made a batch of dough then split it in two. I added some polenta to one half and some tomato purée and smoked paprika to the other. After some proving I roughly rolled and stretched the dough balls out and laid one on top of the other, rolled it up and put it in a tin.

After another prove I brushed the loaf with milk and sprinkled it with chilli flakes.

I love how flexible bread is. Once you get to grips with the basic concept you can try so many different shapes or flavours and it rarely seems to mind. I have also made this with half plain bread dough and half wholemeal with the dough that I used for the layered rolls. They were delicious but the colour split was not as dramatic as this.

Now, if I could only stop eating the props.

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Here is the recipe. The one shown in the photos is half of the dough amount. I made the other half of the dough into ‘non spirally loaves’ (in case it didn’t work). This months challenge was set by Michelle from Utterly Scrummy.