Beer Bread - "Mmmmmm, Beer!"

Since establishing our partnership with Railway City, we’ve been doing more cooking with beer at our house, much to the pleasure of my oldest son! So, it only seemed fitting that beer bread be served with our French onion soup.

I have to say, I’ve been making bread since I was a little girl. I’ve always used yeast, let it rise, punched it down, and then let it rise for a second time. The extra work is well worth the final product, giving the bread a light fluffy texture (It’s actually gotten me out of a grounding or two. How can you stay mad at your kid when you wake up to fresh cinnamon rolls or homemade bread?).

I was a bit skeptical when I was looking over the recipe I chose for the beer bread as it was questionably simple; it was stupidly simple.

Ingredients:

3 cups flour

1 Tbsp baking powder

3 Tbsp sugar

1 tsp salt

1 X 341 mil bottle of beer (acting as the leavening agent) 

I chose Railway City’s IronSpike Amber  for this project for a dark robust flavour.

Basically, it was throw the ingredients in a bowl, mix them up and pop the loaf in the oven. The dough was a bit more sticky than what I’m used to, and this was way too easy, so I really didn’t have great expectations.

 
When the bread was done, it smelled fantastic, and it really did have a wonderful taste and texture. It was a huge hit with the boys, and because it was such a simple recipe, we decided it would be good for quick and easy variations.

We tried additional batches, those times using fresh herbs and cheddar, and again we were delighted with the results. A few friends of Matt's stopped by the next day to clean me out of a bit more food, they were also quite impressed.

I wanted to do a comparison test to determine how big a role the beer actually played in a 'beer bread', so I made up a loaf using one of the 'big 3" brands and put it up alongside the IronSpike Amber version. It was incredible how different they were;  the lightweight top brand was really bland and resulted in a bread that really was nothing to blog about. There simply was just no comparison.  

If you don’t want to be disappointed, use Railway City's IronSpike Amber, for great results every time.

Mmmmm, beer bread!

Cheers, Suzie Q