A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

Some time ago there was a great post over on Kuro5hin titled How to make Bread. Anyway, among the comments was a recipe for beer-batter bread. Yesterday I whipped it together (or a subtle variant) and it was AWESOME! It was easy as could be, took next to no time, and the result was (and still is) delightful.

Here’s my version, which is a subtle deviation from the recipe given.

• 3 cups unbleached all-purpose.
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 bottle fairly dark beer. (I used a 12 ounce bottle of dark St. Pauli Girl
• 1/4 stick of butter

Then…

1. Mix dry ingredients.
2. melt butter
3. Make sure oven is preheated to 375 (ish)
4. add beer and quickly mix as little as reasonable (it’ll be REALLY lumpy, but everything will be at least wet).
5. dump it into a 5″x9″, spread it out a bit.
6. brush butter over top, dump the rest in the pan.

The recipe said bake for 35-40 minutes but I found that (even with an over thermometer) a full hour was almost enough.

The important trick is to mix quickly, but not to over mix. You’ll get this really lumpy concoction that’ll be just fine. You are NOT looking for the kind of thorough ingredient distribution you want in yeast breads, you’re looking for liquid coverage of the dry ingredients. The chemical reaction that’s going to give you your crumb (the beer and the baking powder) starts as soon as those two ingredients touch. You want as much of that reaction to happen in the oven as possible, so it’s vital to get it in there quickly.

This will give you a very hearty sweet heavy bread, with a lingering taste of beer (which, even as someone who finds beer a fundamentally foul substance, I found quite pleasant). The quality of the crust is really quite amazing. It’s very crunchy, but you won’t hurt your teeth on it. Quite delicious.

If you make this, or a variant of it. PLEASE do two things:

1. go link to the original author (at kuro5hin, not me) and give him credit for the post.
2. let me know how it turns out and if you changed it, what you did. I’d love to try variations of this