Make Me A Sandwich!...Beer Bread
We are in the midst of a lockdown. No one is allowed to go out (even though some of you knuckleheads are doing it anyway) so there is a lot of baking going on. I’m happy to say that I’m one of those bakers.
I’ve made many recipes for this blog. At one point I had a year-long series where I made a new recipe every month. While I’m not cooking as many new recipes as that, I am cooking a lot and still plan to try new things. So I decided I’d use beer for its second best purpose. Make some bread.
Here is what you’ll need:
3 cups of flour (sifted)
3 teaspoons of baking powder (omit if using self-rising flour)
¼ cup of sugar
2 (12 ounce) cans beer
½ cup of melted butter
This is by far one of the easiest recipes I’ve prepared for this little segment of our show. I could write it all down in five easy steps but let's be honest, I’ve got space to fill so I’m going to do my best to stretch out the steps. Are you ready? Here we go.
Open a beer. Make sure this is just one of the beers. This beer is for drinking. Have three drinks. The other beer is for step three. Now proceed.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. In previous editions of Make Me a Sandwich I have often railed against having the preheating step first in the instructions. More often than not, you end up with your oven on for an hour before you need to put anything in to bake. The result is that you use up more gas than Exxon-Mobil off the coast of Texas. In this case, however, you would do well to follow instructions because it is a pretty quick process. Faster than a freshly freed prisoner after five-years in prison, if you catch my meaning.
Mix all the ingredients together. That’s it. That’s the step. You could argue that this should be two steps because you’ll want to sift the flour. If you don’t sift your flour then your bread will end up harder than a freshly freed prisoner after five-years in prison, if you catch my meaning. This is because when you measure flour I’m sure you will do exactly what I do and scoop and level your flour using a 1-cup measuring cup. The result is that your flour gets pushed together. Sifting flour makes it lighter so it rises easier and makes a softer, tastier bread.
A word on the beer you use for this recipe. I used an India Pale Ale from West Sixth Brewing that was included as part of my Beer of the Month club. I do not enjoy IPAs at all but I didn’t want to waste precious beer, so I decided to give it a try in this bread. You can use any kind of beer you like and check the results. More on my results a bit later.
A second word on the butter. According to the recipe I was using there are two ways to use the butter. The original recipe calls for the butter to be poured over the top of the dough right before baking. The result would be a hard, crunchy crust. We wanted a more “traditional” style bread so I mixed the butter in with all the other ingredients. The crust was not as crunchy like a baguette but browned up plenty crunchy.
Finally, when you are mixing up the ingredients just mix them enough so it looks like you have a nice pizza dough. I’ll show you a picture, don’t worry, but I don’t know how else to describe it. If you over mix your dough it won’t rise as well so your bread will be flat and weird.
Pour ingredients into a bread pan. That seems pretty easy, right? About as easy as a freshly freed prisoner after five-years in prison, if you catch my meaning. Make sure you grease your pan to make sure the bread doesn’t stick. I used some extra butter for my greasing but you can use some non-stick cooking spray if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.
Bake for 1 hour. Don’t forget to actually insert the bread into the oven and bake for 1 hour. That is 60 minutes. That is 3,600 seconds. If you want to have some fun, make your kindergartner count to 3,600 in order to time your baking. She will give up at about 113 but you’ll at least have just under two minutes alone to think about something other than keeping her entertained while it is pouring down rain outside and you can’t go anywhere because too many stupid people don’t listen to experts and instead throw giant parties while passing around COVID-19 laced bongs filled with Natty Ice then cough into their own hands then pick up every piece of fruit in Harris Teeter.
Sorry, I think I blacked out there for a second. Anyway, bake the bread for an hour.
Let cool for 15 minutes. This will be hard because your bread will look delicious and you will want to eat it all up but you need to let it rest.
Eat.
The results are the kind of bread you would want to slice up to make a turkey sandwich. This bread is fluffy and buttery. It falls apart when sliding it but not in a bad way. More in a way that will allow you to break it into bite size pieces. I would compare it to a tear-away bread that is perfect on it’s own but would be amazing to use to soak up any of that leftover pasta sauce for dinner or some egg yolks from your over-easy eggs.
Using an IPA definitely gave it a unique flavor. You can taste the bitterness of the IPA come through in the bread but it is very slight and also a bit sweet. The combination of the IPA and the sugar makes the bitterness tolerable. In fact, I would say this is the perfect way to use those beers that you would never want to drink. The yeast in beer helps to make the bread rise, especially when every store in the United States is sold out of yeast because everyone is stuck inside because of COVID-19 so they are all baking bread.
This is definitely a recipe I’ll be making again. I want to try this with varying kinds of beer to see how the flavors and textures will change. I’m sure they will all be delicious.
Enjoy!
