I do believe that you can use any type of bread for this recipe; it depends on what’s important to you or what you prefer. You can use whole grain, multi-grain, any shape and dense or light and airy bread. The differences will be in flavor, looks and how easily you can pull the individual parts from the ‘mother bread’. Pick what you like; I used a 9 inch boule, round crusty bread, rather dense bread.

Key Ingredients in This Recipe

You’ll find the complete list of ingredients and exact quantities in the recipe below.

Crusty round loaf of bread or boule
Butter
Garlic – alternatively, you can buy garlic butter.
Tomato
Cheese – pick a cheese that melts easily and has some flavor. That means, I would not only use Mozzarella cheese. It is a fantastic melter and it pulls beautiful strings, but it has not much flavor, unless you used the smoked version. Cheeses like Monterey Jack, Gruyere, Jarlsberg, Gouda cheese, Cheddar cheese are, in my opinion, better candidates.
Parsley – just a little bit of color and added flavor.

How to Make Tomato Cheese Pull Apart Bread

Step 1 – Make garlic butter by combine butter, minced garlic and finely chopped parsley. Add a pinch of salt and pepper and melt the butter. By making your own garlic butter, you can control the amount of garlic you wish to have in your bread. How much garlic you use, may depend on what you’ll have on your agenda the next day; how much close contact you will have.
Step 2 – Start cutting the bread. If you have a round bread as I did, it does not matter where you start, but if you have a oval loaf you may want to consider diagonal cuts as it just gives a nicer look. Slice your bread, but do NOT cut all the way through, cut until you reach the crust at the bottom. Make the cut about 1 inch apart. When you’re done, turn the bread 90 degrees, like a swivel, and slice/cut the bread again, 1 inch thick slices. This time it is a little harder, so go slow. The end result in a bread that is kept together by the bottom crust with stalks of individual bread cubes.

A top down look inside a baked Tomato Cheese Pull Apart Bread

Step 3 – Now starts the hands-on part; the push apart part. Start with impregnating the bread with the melted garlic butter by drizzling it in every crack of your bread. You will not soak up every stalk with the garlic butter, because that would mean loads of butter and thus a very unhealthy end result. What you want is the flavor of the garlic spread over the entire bread. So keep on stirring the butter, so the garlic is divided nicely as well. If your hands are not big enough to keep the pieces apart, use a bread knife or a spatula.
Step 4 – Once the garlic is in the bread, it is time for the tomato. Wash and core the tomato and discard the seeds. The seeds would make the bread to soggy and you want the bread pieces to hold together when you pull them. Cut the tomato in tiny pieces and like the garlic butter, divide over the cracks in the bread.
Step 5 – Next is the cheese part. Grate the cheese you want to use. If you looking for stringy cheese, no better choice than mozzarella. If you want a dramatic pull, where the cheese strings keep on coming and coming, you’ll definitely need to use Mozzarella. I opted for a Gouda cheese because I prefer flavor over strings. With you fingers, push the shredded cheese into the cracks, don’t push it down too much, keep it light and airy, so the heat from the oven can come everywhere. If some of the cheese ends up on the outside of the bread, that’s fine, it will add an extra dimension, extra color, extra flavor. All ingredients are in the bread now, so time to bake.
Step 6 – Wrap aluminum foil around the bread and bake it approx. 20 minutes in a preheated oven of 400 degrees F. When you open the foil, you should see only melted cheese. If not, put it back in the oven for a little while. When the cheese is totally melted, unwrap the bread and place it in the oven for another 5 minutes. These 5 minutes make the crust crunchy and add just a little color. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve.

You’ll have a beautiful flower of bread, a Tomato Cheese Pull Apart Bread. Full of color, full of flavor and ready. Pull and Enjoy!

When you’re not eating all of it at once, keep it in the fridge, pop in the oven or microwave the next day and it will taste great again. May be even better, because the various flavors have soaked into the bread even longer.

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