Antipasto Tear and Share Bread - A Meal in a Loaf !

I saw Jamie Oliver on television briefly last night making something rather similar to this. It's one of those really versatile recipes where you can throw almost anything at it that you have in the fridge.

Basically, you make up a batch of bread dough. I used just a standard bread recipe - 500g flour, sachet of fast yeast, 2 tsp sugar, 1.1/2 tsp salt, good glug of olive oil and 300ml of warm water.

Make the bread dough as you would normally, and leave covered to rise for 30mins or until doubled in size.

Knock the dough back and roll it out into a rectangle about 1cm thick

Then, it's time to fill your bread. I chose to spread mine with red pesto and fill with some chopped antipasto. I'd griddled off 4 bell peppers, 1 courgette and a rather enormous onion.

There was a ball of mozarella lurking in the fridge, so I tore that up and put it along one long edge of my rectange. Then, I rolled the rectangle over the cheese and spread out the chopped antipasto over the rest of the bread dough - keeping it away from the last 2"in length of the rectangle.

Roll the bread dough until you end up with something resembling a swiss roll.

Chop off 2 > 3" chunks and stand them end up in a 10" round silicone baking pan mould. Don't worry about excess space. The bread is best left to sit for 20mins or so now and will expand into leftover space.

Pop it in the oven - 180 > 190deg C fan oven for 25 > 30 mins

When you bring it out, drizzle with olive oil and leave to cool a little before serving.

There is gooey mozarella in the centre of each section.

Too yummy for words. I'm planning on making a banana and chocolate version of this for the girls and toddlers for a picnic lunch on Friday.

Sorry for the rubbish photos - the half light outside made lighting really poor for photos indoors and we were too hungry to wait until it got really dark just for the sake of pictures !