Southern Bread

Ok, so as I’ve been saying, this bread recipe is infinitely changeable. Here is the same recipe modified to be beer bread. Most of the beer bread recipes you see don’t use yeast. They just rely on the carbonation of the beer and maybe some baking powder to help it rise. This, however, is a true yeast bread, and will be much fluffier. Actually, this base recipe I’ve been giving you in the last few posts started out as a beer bread recipe, even though I’ve changed some of the quantities and instructions around, so thanks goes out to Kevin Weeks at Seriously Good for the great recipe. And, for the inspiration to experiment.

Beer Bread:

Dry Ingredients:

• 2.5 Cups of Wheat Flour
• 1 Cup of Bread Flour
• 1 TBSP of Salt

Wet Ingredients:

• 12 oz. bottle of warm beer
• 1 oz. of olive oil
• 2 tsp Instant Dry Yeast
• 2 TBSP of Honey

Instructions:

1. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl. Don’t add the yeast to the dry ingredients.
2. Warm the beer by putting the bottle/can in a bowl of hot water for about 10 minutes. Longer if it came out of the fridge. You want it warm. Not hot, not cold. Warm.
3. Now add the dry yeast, oil and honey to the warm beer and stir it around with a fork vigorously until all of the honey is dissolved.
4. Now walk away and let the yeast liquid sit and fester for about 15 minutes. The yeast is going to get really active and start to party. Don’t crash it.
5. Come back and dump the liquid/yeast mix into the dry ingredients.
6. Get your hands wet with some water and begin to mix. You will get messy, but it’s worth it.
7. When everything is mixed thoroughly, flour the countertop and dump the dough out onto the flour.
8. Knead the dough for 6 minutes until smooth, adding plenty of flour as needed. Don’t skimp.
9. Now stretch and shape the dough into a ball with the seam at the bottom.
10. Clean and dry out your mixing bowl and then spray it inside with cooking spray or wipe it with oil.
11. Drop your dough ball into the bowl seam side down and shoot it with a light shot of cooking spray also.
12. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a hand towel and let sit for an hour until it at least doubles in size.
13. After it doubles, uncover and punch down the dough to get all the air out. Don’t punch it hard, just make sure it’s deflated good.
14. Now turn it out on the floured countertop again and knead it very lightly for about a minute. You just want to work it a little to get it back to a good shape.
15. Now, crisco the inside of a loaf pan. Use plenty of lard/crisco. You don’t want the loaf sticking to the pan. That’s a disaster.
16. Cover and let sit again for about 30 minutes. It will rise quite a bit, but don’t let it get too big where it’s ballooning out over the sides of the pan.
17. Lower your oven rack to a little below center and put the pan on the rack.
18. Set the oven to 400° F and set the timer to 30 minutes.
19. When the timer goes off the bread is done. Let it cool on a wire rack for about an hour.