Best and Easiest Outta This World Beer Bread

(warning:  this is a quick bread – sorry if you were hoping for yeast!)

Ted had a can of beer sitting in the fridge for TOO long.  And the rule (my unwritten rule) is that after TOO long, beer is no longer a beverage; it becomes an ingredient.

(Secretly, I don’t think beer is much of a beverage at any time; can’t really stand drinking the stuff.)

The words Beer and Bread were floating through my brain this afternoon.  And a quick and lazy Google search revealed a Recipezaar recipe that had absolutely the most rave reviews I have ever seen:  456 reviews, and an overall rating over 4.7 out of 5!

Of course, I had to make it:  humbly entitled Beer Bread, and posted by a guy named Gerald Norman.

I have to say, this was amazingly FAST and easy to mix!  The recipe coaxes readers to sift and sift and sift, and for once, I actually did.  Then you pour in the beer, stir, pour it into a pan and bake.

This is easily the most yeasty quickbread I’ve ever had; if people don’t know your secret, they’ll think it fermented for weeks.  It is an eye-opening bread – one of those quick n’ easy treats that can easily fill in the “starch gap” in a family weekday meal.

Here’s how it slices:

And a close up:

  

This bread had an astonishingly rich taste which was quite beery - almost too beery for me to like it.  Almost. 

I think if I’d used a more mainstream brew, the taste might have been more nondescript, but I used a very flavourful local beer that Ted was undoubtedly saving for a special occasion.

Very crisp crust all around, thanks to the butter poured over top.

And the inside was surpringly chewy, but not unpleasant.  Sort of like a bagel:  you want a bit of crunch on the outside and then nice teeth-exercising chewy on the inside.

No idea how this will be as leftovers, but I can’t imagine it being terrible.  I generally toast all leftover bread anyway:  I’m a bit of a snob, and if it’s not searingly fresh, I just don’t bother.

Probably moot anyway.  It’s nearly gone now and will probably be entirely finished once I’ve sat down and had it with my nice bowl of veggie chili!