Mike Wilson

Ok, I’ve just been informed that there are people out there who actually read this drivel and used to do so for the baking.

Here’s the deal.

Oven’s expensively out of order, so I’m stuck with my Cuisinart bread machine. Delightful as bread machines go but it’s bloody cheating.

A few days ago I tried my BeerBatterBread recipe in the thing and it really didn’t work so well. It under mixed (I restarted the cycle to give it a thorough going over) and it didn’t rise very well. It’s a chemically leavened bread, not a biologically leavened one. Now, there are settings for that on the machine but either they don’t work well or I have to tailor the amount of baking powder in the recipe for bread machine use.

Eyeballing it next to the recipes they gave me yielded no meaningful clue.

The result did actually taste pretty good. Though it did bake a bit too long. This cooked all instead of almost all of the alcohol out, which is a shame. There’s a slight sharpness to it when properly made that I now understand is incomplete evaporation of the alcohol in the Guinness.

The original BeerBatterBread recipe is a slight modification of the one found in the most awesome Kuro5hin post of all time. (I figure it’s ok to post the same link twice seeing as how I hadn’t posted it in 5 or so years.)

I’ll do some more experimenting and see what I come up with.

Unfortunately my current economic situation rather perfectly precludes me from doing any reasonable baking.

This started as a comment on I Think Therefore I Blog, but I got a little windy so I cut it short over there.

As an almost “long time” baker (does 7 years count?) I finally succumbed to the pressure to buy a bread machine. It’s always seemed like cheating to me.

But I’ve got to say the results are absolutely stellar. I use it for a couple things:

• Bread to be ready when I get up in the morning (I try to keep this to a minimum.) Perhaps it’s a sign of getting old but I’d sure rather be woken up by the smell of bread than… well, nevermind.

• Testing ingredient combinations. This is awesome. If I have a “I wonder what would happen if I threw THAT in to a loaf” thought (which only happens a few times a day while sitting at my desk trading) I just set it up and let it go. If I like the result out of the machine THEN I do the real bread crafting work.

Got a loaf going now.  It’s just too rimey out not to have fresh bread.

Haven’t posted a bread recipe in a dog’s age.  I made this last weekend when in Virginia and it was a rather impressive hit:

For the dough:

You’ll also need:

Topping:

You can go a few ways with this. What’s worked for me is the following:

As you can see, it’s actually a very simple bread. Because the focus of this is primarily on the topping and crust, you have some latitude in how much attention you want to pay to the bread proper. This is something I pull out as a crowd pleaser when I don’t have my kitchen, bowls, scales, measuring stuff and ingredients handy (my kitchen doesn’t exactly travel well.)

1. So as for technique you can really just combine everything, mix and knead, then set to rise for about an hour and a half. It should be close to doubled if not more.
2. Pan the dough into two well-oiled 8×8 “brownie pans.” I’m a big fan of pyrex for this. However, this past weekend I used a large piece of stoneware that was quite nice. Unfortunately I don’t quite know what the dimensions were. Let it rise in this form for a bit over an hour.
3. Preheat the oven to 375
4. Carefully dimple the dough with your fingers. You should push down a little more than half way with your finger tips. This isn’t the most precise of operations. At the end the dough should have a grid of dimples over the whole thing.
5. Pour 1/3 to 1/2 Cup of olive oil over the dough. What you’re looking for here is for an awful lot of it to slide down the sides into the bottom of the pan, with a bunch pooling in the little dimples you just added to the surface.
6. Add the Kosher/Sea Salt and the Rosemary. But do NOT top the loaves with cheese. That comes later.
7. Into the oven (at 375) for a half-hour.
8. Pull both loaves out and then sprinkle the top with cheese. I’m frequently surprised at how much cheese can actually be added without overpowering this, so don’t worry. (If you put the cheese on before they go in the oven then the cheese will burn before the bread is actually done and you’ll end up with an unavoidable mess. Different cheeses behave differently, but doing things this way is pretty safe.)
9. Put them back in the oven for the last 10-15 minutes. You’ll have to eyeball it. You’re looking for the toothpick test plus a couple minutes.
10. Take it out and let it cool a bit before cutting in to it. It’s not a baguette so I’m not going to suggest you wait until it’s completely cooled. But give it a minute.

The addition of the Olive Oil is quite nice as it essentially deep-fries the crust. This is why it’s important you don’t try to do this on a simple cookie sheet or (heaven forbid) a silpat.

It looks like a lot of steps, but there’s really not so much that can go wrong. It’s a nice crowd pleaser.

I’d also encourage experimentation with toppings.

Of course if you’re being persnickety you can doll up the process a bunch and you’ll no doubt get a great enhancement. So things like proofing the yeast and setting up a preferment so you can get a second or third rise out of it is strictly optional.

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