Thursday, March 20, 2008

Whole Wheat Beer Bread

I had a craving for bread today while I was cleaning the kitchen, and since that happened around 2PM, I didn't really have the time or energy to make a yeast bread from scratch. Instead, I planned to use some of the lovely Canadian cream ale I picked up on my trip north with a bit of maple syrup instead of sugar to craft a beer bread. Mmm...Canadian beer bread. This recipe calls for pouring butter over the batter before you bake it, which gives the crust a delicious buttery flavor as it cooks.

What follows is my experiment with said bread:



Ingredients
  • 2 cups white whole wheat flour plus 1 cup organic unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 3 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 1 1/4 cup beer
  • 1/4 cup maple syrup
  • 1/4 cup (1 stick) butter, melted
Directions
  1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees
  2. Sift together dry ingredients, set aside
  3. Lightly grease and flour loaf pans (I used two 5x3 bread loaf pans)
  4. Combine dry ingredients with beer and maple syrup, mix thoroughly
  5. Pour batter into pans, pour melted butter over mixture
  6. Bake for 1 hour
  7. Remove from pan and let cool on wire rack for at least 15 minutes
Notes
Instead of using sugar (which the recipe originally called for) I used maple syrup. It turned out awesome!

Also, here's a picture of it sliced open, full of nummy goodness. Please pardon the flash on the camera, it was being cranky.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Um, shouldn't the real step 3 include some mixing of the wet and dry ingredients?

Kitchen Kitteh said...

Logically, yes. In fact, it will shortly be edited to read such. This, friends, is the side effect of making posts with pictures. You forget steps. *nods* Yes indeed.

Unknown said...

Maple Syrup for the win! Sugar plus added flavor - and I seem to recall it's kinda big in Canada, so fits the theme with the beer as well.

Side note - I thought a cup was 8 oz. (but then, I could also be wrong - sure as hell wouldn't be the first time).

Kitchen Kitteh said...

Hmm...4oz butter is 1/2 cup...so yes. 8 oz is 1 cup, which means I ended up using...well, I know I actually used 1 1/4 cup of beer, so my notes are wrong. That will get a quick edit.

Oh, and I did the recipe again today, and I used the entire bottle of beer...which I figure is about 1 1/2 cup...so I finally went and used what the recipe called for!

Unknown said...

At least you have *some* idea what you did when you're done to be able to reproduce it - usually I'm peering around the kitchen with a product (often BBQ / spaghetti sauce) and the idea that I want to make it less bland - the end result usually forms around what I find ("Hmm. Lemon juice - that sounds like it'll work").

I lost count the number of sauces I made for marinades that I used and forgot what was in them.

Kitchen Kitteh said...

That's happened to me a time or two. It's very frustrating when you finally get something PERFECT...only to find that you can't remember what you did to get it there.