Beer Bread

Sometimes, I just can’t get myself excited to blog about something I’ve baked. I think that’s likely going to be the struggle with The Bread Bible bake along. Bread’s generally pretty easy, in my opinion, and none of the steps are all that exciting. It’s typically a long, slow process, with not a lot of visual interest. The one interesting thing I have to say about this bread: Rose says she makes it all the time, but because her husband doesn’t like beer, she makes it with water instead! She called it “beer-less beer bread.”

Jay chose the beer for this one. We were in the LCBO picking up beer to take with to our friends’ cottage, and I told him to pick something interesting and dark. We ended up with “Old North Mocha Porter” from Baysville, Ontario.

As you can see, I used my flour mill again for this bread. 🙂

This is another straight dough, meaning that all of the ingredients are dumped in, together, then the whole thing is mixed up. No starter or sponge. The beer adds the fermented flavour, here.

After mixing to a rough dough, you let it rest before kneading. After kneading, let it rise until doubled, then shape.

If you look at this picture, you’ll see that I did a lousy job of shaping, because there’s that bit of dough that is kind of folded over. The bread blew out here, when it baked. 😛

I took Rose’s advice and slashed in the “lantern” pattern.

And here’s the finished loaf! That’s my butter bell in the corner. I love having softened butter sitting on the counter. We stopped using this little guy for a while, but now that there’s more bread in the house, I’m keeping it stocked. I like coming home, slicing off a piece of bread, buttering it, then sitting on the counter and consuming it, while my husband cooks dinner. 😉