We knew that we loved homemade bread even before the world exploded, we just didn’t realize how much. Recently we’ve been making bread fanatically every day, trying lots of different recipes and achieving fantastic results with our old bread machine.
Sadly our yeast is running out and supply is hard to come by.
Luckily, there are several solutions!
Sourdough Bread
We have a sourdough starter going and made a couple of loaves to varying degrees of failure. I mean, it turned out okay if you wanted to call it flat bread, but not what we expected.
The starter overflowed and as a result we didn’t have quite enough starter.
We continued anyway.
Refrigerating the dough overnight as the recipe suggested, formed a bit of a crust on the dough, so we added some oil, which made the dough a bit too dense. Also, the hardened exterior didn’t help to form a smooth silky dough.
It was tasty though. Especially with some sun dried tomato pesto and La Bomba sauce.
We have a second attempt at sourdough bread proofing as I write this and it looks a lot better. We’ll see.
But sourdough bread is a very lengthy process.
What if you need bread in a hurry and can’t wait a couple of days for your sourdough to do its thing?
Beer Bread to the rescue
That’s right. Beer Bread!
Luckily—and not only for the purpose of bread-making—there is no shortage of beer in Canada at the moment. We made a truly delicious bread with very simple ingredients. The rising agents are beer and Baking Powder and the process is quick and easy! The bread is a bit on the sweet side, but very tasty. We researched some recipes and modified a few of them to our likings with good results. Give it a try!
Baking this homemade bread is like killing two birds with the same stone (and not only because it’s a dense bread). You’ll be eating and drinking beer at the same time.
If you are running into a conundrum whether to sacrifice a bottle of beer to make your homemade bread bread, I’m afraid that a shortage of bread is not your only problem.
On second thought perhaps I should have kept this a secret. Soon there may be a run on beer!
Easy Beer Bread Recipe
Ingredients
3 cups flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup sugar or honey
1 tsp salt
16 oz beer (you can use any kind of beer, we used an IPA)
Olive oil to drizzle on top
Optional: you can add a dash of seasoning such as garlic, Italian seasoning, Herbes de Provence, or any of your favourite herbs.
Instructions
Mix all dry ingredients until combined
Add beer and mix well
pour batter into greased loaf pan and drizzle some olive oil on top
bake in a preheated oven (375 degrees Fahrenheit) for about 50 minutes until golden brown and baked though.
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Beer bread? Who knew?! Sounds interesting.
Try is if you have any beer to spare!
Like your endeavors to make bread. I just make pancake like bread out of self rising flour when we are running low. Use to make sour dough bread all the time. The beer bread looked delicious. I have never tried that one. Enjoyed your post. Creating recipes is fun, I do that quite often. Never measure anything – so some things are good and some are not. Happy Baking to you.
Haha, I cook and bake like that as well. ALways a surprise! By the way, you can use self rising bread for the beer bread, in which case you will need to omit the salt and baking powder. Thanks for reading and stay safe!
The whole running out if yeast….going give this a try…but maybe I will have to steal one of my husband’s 🍺
Hahaha, as long as he doesn’t guard his beer too much!
If your yeast is running out, but you still have a little bit why don’t you grow some more. One teaspoon of yeast in a sugar solution and it will start growing within a minute or two. Keep it at room temperature and treat it like you would your sour dough.
Oh, cool! How much sugar/water do you add it to?
Well, as much as you like. The only thing is temperature. Put it in the freezer it will go to sleep, at room temperature it will sing but too hot can kill it. The “rule of thumb” is the old brewers rule. Put your thumb in and that should be the right temperature.
One teaspoon will grow big enough to eat a kilo of sugar in a few days. You will need to experiment. I would try about a Teaspoon to about three tablespoons in a cup of water at thumb temperature and see what happens. Try it, take photos and write up a really helpful post. I have more yeast than I can use so I don’t need to try. But you can do it.
Wow! Why did I not think about this 🙂 I will do some research and give it a try. Thanks!
Probably because you haven’t been brewing beer for the last fifty years or dabbling in whisky. That way you learn an awful lot about yeast.
We had some brewing plans but never actually got around to it
But make sure you don’t let any wild yeasts get in, so keep it covered.
Okay!
Best O luck.
Thanks so much! Can’t wait to try!
PS, you might like to look at the Circu Gardeners Kitchen. He is in England and he just posted about sour dough.
https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/9576824/posts/2690370318
I will!
I used to keep a jar of rye and white sourdough starters on my counter at all times. I never did quite perfect the breadmaking process. It seemed to work best during the hot humid Florida summers and took what felt like a decade for the loaf to rise in the cooler months. Either way the taste was still incredible – even if the bread was a bit flat – but the way the house smelt….heaven! With summer coming I may need to do a wild yeast capture and start a jar for the summer. 😉
Still working on it…so far we made great flatbread pizza and croutons with it, but it doesn’t qualify as bread yet 🙂