The Unexpected Fruit You Should Be Baking Into Your Bread

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Bread is one of the oldest staples on earth and remains a beloved part of every meal, based on just how many types of bread exist. One way to upgrade a bread recipe is to add inclusions, and tomatoes are the unexpected fruit that will take bread to delicious new heights.

Tomatoes come in numerous varieties, but they're all bursting with sweet, tangy umami, and baking will only serve to enhance these savory fruits. Tomatoes also contain a lot of water, which will help keep the bread moist. Plus, since you'll be baking them, bread is a great recipe to use up older tomatoes before they spoil.

There are many ways to incorporate tomatoes into your bread recipe. If you're making a savory quick bread, for example, you can puree tomatoes and add them to the batter as a wet ingredient. If you're making a yeast-based bread, you can incorporate roasted cherry tomatoes into the premade dough. You can also use sliced tomatoes or halved cherry tomatoes as toppings for flatbreads like focaccia or naan. For that matter, you can doctor up store-bought bread dough with tomato inclusions and toppings. We've already come up with various ways to transform Trader Joe's pizza dough into focaccia and cheese sticks. Press cherry tomatoes into pizza dough before baking it for shortcut focaccia. You can also roll tomato puree, herbs, and garlic into Pillsbury crescent or biscuit dough to make tomato and garlic knots.

Barring store-bought dough, a quick bread recipe is very easy and accommodating for tomato inclusions. If you're using the tomatoes as a puree, you have to take into account that the puree itself should account for most of the moisture in the batter. A pound of tomatoes yields around 2 cups of pureed tomatoes, so you'll need to reduce some of the other liquid ingredients like milk or buttermilk. For instance, a standard buttermilk cornbread recipe generally calls for 1 cup of buttermilk, but our recipe for tomatillo and green chili cornbread uses half a cup of buttermilk and half a pound of tomatillos. You can also use thicker wet ingredients like sour cream and mayonnaise to ensure the bread batter doesn't get too runny. Another way to incorporate tomatoes into quick bread is by simply chopping or mashing them into chunks and stirring them into the batter as a dry ingredient. You could make a savory pound cake with sour cream, stirring in grated cheese and diced Roma tomatoes.

If you're adding pureed tomatoes to yeast-based dough, you should keep temperature in mind, adding room temperature or slightly warmed puree to yeast-based dough. We recommend adding pieces or halved tomatoes during the second or third set of dough stretching and folding. Stretching the dough bolsters the gluten development, and a strong network of gluten will anchor tomatoes in place.