MUSHROOM TEAR AND SHARE LOAF

The veg shop didn't have any field mushrooms which I needed for Sunday dinner - I was planning to make stuffed mushrooms en croute.

Instead I decided to experiment with some smaller mushrooms in a loaf.

First of all I made a bread dough - 200g strong brown flour - with tomato puree, dessertspoon soy sauce, teaspoon mixed herbs, teaspoon curry powder , 4 s-d-tomatoes chopped small plus 30g sunflower oil from the s-d-tomatoes. Then I de-stalked 8 mushrooms and cut out a little of the insides, to enable me to include more stuffing.

I divided the dough into 8 pieces, and rolled them out into circles, nicking three triangles out of the dough to help me shape them better:

The dough is then 'cupped' around the underneath of each mushroom

The largest mushroom was placed in the middle, with the others around it:

The parcel at the top was made from the triangles cut from each circle of dough and contains the trimmings scraped from the inside of the mushrooms, with a little mushroom pate and a teaspoon of nutritional yeast 

Then each mushroom was stuffed with a mixture of mushroom pate (Pateole yeast spread - highly recommended!), vegan pesto and tomato puree with a little cayenne pepper mixed in:

The dough is already rising. You can tell I began with the centre one, followed by the one at nine o'clock and so on

The bread was then put to prove for a little while and baked for 20 minutes at 200C:

And served

As you've probably gathered by now, this was in the way of an experiment.

Conclusions:
This was very tasty, indeed, BUT - I have to say the bread was very doughy and undercooked. There was too much bread and not enough filling. Next time I'll use bigger mushrooms and make the dough a lot thinner. Possibly reducing the amount of flour to 150g. And i'll bake it at 180C.