Beer Bread. Have you heard of it? It’s bread that’s baked with beer in it. No need to worry. The bread itself won’t make you drunk. Unless, of course, you dunk a slice of it in beer or eat it while drinking beer. And hey, who’s to stop you? Definitely not me.
The last time I blogged about my baking experiments was back in 2017 when I made Black Forest Cake. That was oh so long ago. Since then, I’ve been conducting my baking experiments, just not blogging about them. That’s about to change!
After checking X number of recipes, I landed on Food.com‘s recipe that you can find here. What will you need?
Ingredients:
- 3 cups all-purpose flour (sifted)
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3 teaspoons baking powder
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1 teaspoon salt
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1⁄4 cup sugar
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1 (12-ounce) can beer – I used San Miguel Super Dry.
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1⁄2 cup melted butter (1/4 cup will do just fine) – I used Earth Balance Vegan Buttery Sticks because regular butter is a no-no for me.
If you want to simplify your life, just buy Self-Rising Flour. If you’ll use that, you can omit the baking powder and salt.
Once you’ve got your ingredients ready . . .
Procedure:
Preheat the oven to 375°F and grease a loaf pan. Set the pan aside.
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. Sorry, I didn’t take a picture when I started. I wasn’t planning to blog about this experiment, but then I changed my mind. It happens.
Next, open that can of beer you have and pour in the bowl. Just a reminder! Don’t use a whisk to stir the dry ingredients AND the beer. I started with a whisk on hand, but the ingredients got trapped in the metal wires . . . ho ho. I replaced it quickly with a wooden spoon.
Using either a wooden spoon or a spatula, stir all the ingredients until everything’s mixed well. No dry parts. No flour to be seen. The result will be thick and sticky. My dough wasn’t smooth as you can see here. I considered mixing it some more by hand, but I remember reading that if you overwork your beer bread dough, it will become hard. I don’t want that.
Pour it into a greased loaf pan. Smooth it out as best as you can. There’s no need to go crazy. If you look up pictures of beer bread, you’ll see that the tops are wrinkly anyway.
Pour the melted butter on top of the beer bread dough.
Then bake at 375 degrees F (175 degrees) for about 50 – 60 minutes or until the bread is golden brown on top.
I baked mine for 45 minutes because I have a 32-liter countertop electric oven.
Allow your pretty little bread to cool on the counter for about 5 minutes.
Then move the bread to a cooling rack and cool for at least 15 minutes. Feel free to take pictures while waiting. I know I did.
Initially, I was bothered by the browned crust. I felt that 45 minutes was still a bit of a long bake time. But a lesser bake time might not bake the bread properly. So I just gotta embrace the crust.
Here’s the last beer bread picture for this post.
Verdict:
You can serve a slice of beer bread topped with butter, jam or even cheese spread. In addition, I think beer bread will go well with soup, chili, barbecued meat, also with dips and spreads. It seems to be a versatile quick bread that you can make off the cuff when you have people coming over. There’s no need to deal with yeast, just like with banana bread.
In short, this recipe’s definitely a keeper. So much so that I baked some beer bread again today and sent it out to friends. 😃