Jane cooked up a wonderful tomato soup yesterday using some of the harvest from our polytunnel. When I make soup I normally go for the rustic finish and leave it chunky but she decided to strain it for a more refined effect. Delicious, but it does leave quite a lot of tomato (mixed with onion and garlic) behind. My solution was to bake a tomato bread:

This used my normal bread recipe (100:70:2:2 ratio of bread flour, water, salt and yeast) but, before the final shaping, I took a portion of the dough and mixed it with some of the tomato soup left-overs. I folded this inside the larger portion of dough, which was left to make its final rise before slashing and misting with water before going onto my breadstone into a pre-heated oven.

One thing I was unsure about was how long to cook it, since the tomato mixture had introduced a lot of extra moisture to the middle. After some online research, I decided to let the centre reach 88°C. Taste tests suggest this was a good target, so I have not only discovered a way to reduce food waste but also a more scientific approach to determining when a loaf is done.