Recipe Blogging

Recipe Blogging

It seems to be all the rage among other gunbloggers. I'm actually a fairly enthusiastic cook, but I don't do anything really fancy. For my initial foray into recipe blogging, I will give you the simplest bread recipe I know: Beer bread.

Now I don't drink, but I will use alcoholic beverages in recipes (white wine in my chicken & wild rice; red in salisbury bourguignon; beer in both marinades and in this recipe).

Ingredients:

3C Self-rising flour (must use self-rising, not all-purpose)
3Tbs sugar
12 oz beer - use something you'd otherwise be willing to drink.

1 regular size bread pan is required.

Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Mix the flour and the sugar in the bread pan. Pour in the beer, and stir until all of the dry components are thorougly mixed. The result should be a thick batter. Scrape down the sides of the bread pan so the batter is uniform across the bottom of the pan. Bake at 350º for one hour.

No kneading, no rising, not much to clean up, just bread. It's heavy, but damned tasty. Last night I picked up a 2lb package of self-rising and a 24 oz. Bud. I also got three of those little disposable bread pans you use for banana bread and the like. Two lbs. of flour is right at six cups. I doubled the batch and it made three perfect mini-loaves. One was dinner last night. This morning I toasted some under the broiler in the oven. Give it a try.

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter Hammerbach, you CAN use all-purpose flour, just add 1-½ tsp of baking powder (not baking soda) and ½ tsp of salt to each cup of all-purpose flour to make it self-rising. Mix thoroughly before adding wet ingredients.