Recipe: Appetizing Traditional Maltese bread

Traditional Maltese bread. The hotter the weather gets, the more we find ourselves thinking about a good cut of Maltese bread with tomatoes, olives, tuna and whatnot! HOBZ MALTI, a light sourdough bread shaped into a ball. And then there's the FTIRA, a rougher shaped flatbread with a hole in the middle, which looks more like a huge rough donut to be honest.

Cut your desired bread in half. I eat, breath and live cooking. Ħobż is the word for bread in Maltese. It arrived in the language from the Semitic-Arabic side of things -- no surprise, as Maltese is as profoundly influenced by Arabic languages as by the Latinate ones. You can cook Traditional Maltese bread using 3 ingredients and 3 steps. Here is how you achieve that.

Ingredients of Traditional Maltese bread

1. It's 1 dash of pepper.
2. It's 1 dash of salt.
3. It's 1 can of tomato paste.

The speed with which the baker works, kneading and forming the dough into round loaves, is phenomenal. However, making the perfect, traditional Maltese loaf is a slow process, taking between seven and eight hours from kneading the dough to taking the bread out of the oven. Our love affair with bread dates back to the New Stone Age. Maltese bread is a solid sourdough bread.

Traditional Maltese bread step by step

1. Cut your desired bread in half..
2. Spread your tomato paste on..
3. Add salt and pepper.

It has a crisp crust and a light crumb with irregular holes - and it is very tasty. It uses a dough-like starter (pre-ferment) called ħmira or tinsila in Maltese, but called biga in Italian. Fresh groceries, delicatessen, meat, world wines, household essentials and more - all delivered to your kitchen table. If there's one type of food that Maltese people abroad miss when they think of home, it's Maltese bread. Traditionally baked Ħobż tal-Malti has a hard and crunchy crust on the outside and soft and fluffy white bread from the inside, and tastes nothing like a regular loaf of sliced white bread you might be used to from your local supermarket. Ħobż tal-Malti is a crusty sourdough bread from Malta, usually baked in wood ovens.

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