Sunday, January 15, 2012

Home-Brewed Beer Bread

Besides cooking and baking one of my passions as many of you know is brewing beer. I am constantly trying new styles and recipes for beers, and of late have spent more time brewing than I have in the kitchen. But this week I decided it might be a good time to combine the two passions by taking one of my recent home-brews and making it one of the star ingredients in a bread.
Beer bread is not your normal light and fluffy bread that you would use for sandwiches and the like, but rather a more dense bread that is great as a starter or snack, and pairs most excellently with various cheeses, olive tapenade, and the like.
Your beer bread will vary in flavor depending on what type of beer you use (I used a Rye Ale I made a couple months ago), although I cannot stress enough the importance of using a good quality craft or home-brewed beer. Don't screw up your final product by dumping some watered down commercial beer in there. At any rate this bread is very easy and fairly quick to make, so get in the kitchen and give it a go!

Ingredients
3 cups of sifted flour (make sure to sift your flour!)
2 large eggs
3 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1/4 cup sugar
12 oz. of a good quality beer
1/4 to 1/2 cup of melted butter

Preparation
Preheat oven to 375. Mix the dry ingredients together with the eggs and beer in a large mixing bowl. You may need to add a little more flour to make it a little less sticky (I added a couple more sifted spoonfuls to get it to the desired consistency). Add your mixture to a greased bread pan and then pour the melted butter over your mixture. I actually melted a full 1/2 cup of butter here, but didn't use all of it, because a little over a 1/4 cup was plenty, but add as much as you prefer. Place in the oven and bake for 1 hour. Remove from oven and take the loaf out of the pan and let cool for about 15 minutes on a baking rack. Slice and serve.
That's it! You can also add additional dried herbs to this mixture depending on what flavors you are going for and that would best match the type of beer you ended up using. Feel free to experiment! Enjoy!

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