The Great Bread Debacle

It's no secret that bread and I are not friends.  I've been wanting to make my own bread for quite some time now, but I find the task incredibly daunting. Bread is difficult.  When you hear people casually say, "oh, I'll just throw together a loaf of bread real quick," they're full of crap.  There's no "just throwing together," and neither is there anything "real quick."  Bread takes forever.  Even when the bread is made from a mix, it still somehow takes forever.

Throughout the years I've dabbled in random acts of bread making.  I've made that Amish Friendship Bread that was all the rage about 15 years ago.  I wonder if anyone still makes that?  You know the stuff...you get a baggie of wet stuff and you set it on your counter, and throughout the week you have a task to perform every day...mash it one day, add sugar another day, let it sit the next day...on and on until the end when you finally get to add the flour and whatnot and make your bread.  It was good.  It was sweet.  It seems like a bit much to go through for one loaf of bread, but there was no kneading/punching/rising, so it was easy. I remember mom and I cranking out loaf after loaf of the stuff and freezing it for later.  We went a little nuts, truth be told.  I haven't had Amish Friendship Bread since.  I'm somehow able to make a mean banana bread, courtesy of my mom's recipe.  It's sweet and dense and has just the right amount of sugary sweetness to the crust.  Again, no kneading/punching/rising involved.  I'll post that recipe on here one of these days.  And then there's the Tastefully Simple beer bread that just about everyone in America has had the opportunity to try.  I remember about 10 years ago when people would have Tastefully Simple parties in their homes and the beer bread was everyone's favorite.  Easy stuff.

Easy or not though, I wanted to try to make my own bread, partly because I'll know what's going in it, and most importantly, what isn't.  And there's just something about the way your house smells when a fresh loaf of bread is baking.

Bread Attempt #1

Not wanting to delve headfirst into the extreme world of bread making, I decided that I would use a mix to try to make things easier on myself.  This particular mix was Bob's Red Mill 10 Grain.  Packed full of fiber, destined to bring about that wonderful fresh-baked bread smell to my kitchen and a satisfying BM sometime later, I thought this mix would be a slam dunk.  It wasn't.  After waiting hours and hours for this dense lump of dough to rise, after numerous rounds of kneading (really?  8 whole minutes??), punching it down (what is that anyway?) and "rising," I figured enough was enough and threw the dang thing in the oven.  What went into the oven was a nice little mound of dough in the pan.  What came out was a brick of grains that would have been better suited for paperweight duty than for eating.  Seriously, I probably could have been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon had I beat an intruder (or Simon...haha) with it.  I should have known that it was a failure when the baked loaf had not changed in size from the unbaked loaf.  I decided to humor myself and slice it up, give it a little taste.  So it was crispy on the outside, and not done on the inside.  Not only that, but it was the worst tasting bread I have ever had in my life.  I don't know if that was the fault of the mix or the fault of the prep, but it was terrible.

Bread Attempt #2

Being a fan of the Tastefully Simple Beer Bread mix, I thought maybe I was better off just ordering a few boxes and calling my bread making excursion quits.  All you need for Tastefully Simple bread is the mix, a bottle of beer, a loaf pan, and an oven.  That's it.  Hard to mess that up, right?  So I was on the Tastefully Simple website, looking at the ingredients in the beer bread, and the list seemed rather long to me.  Lots of preservatives.  So I thought to myself, how hard could this possibly be from scratch?  Keep in mind, this was mere minutes after the Bob's Red Mill loaf had taken a satisfyingly dense leap into the trash can.  So I went online and came across a recipe for beer bread that had exactly 6 ingredients: flour, sugar, beer, baking powder, salt and butter.  That's it.  So I got to work.  I added the dry ingredients to the bowl, added the bottle of beer, popped the whole mess into a loaf pan, melted some butter over the top, and threw it in the oven.  The whole time I was thinking to myself that the entire process was much too easy...there's no way that I could get a viable loaf of bread out of this, especially since I had been working ALL day to get the Bob's Red Mill to turn out.  I did think for a minute that maybe the bottle of beer would have been put to better use had I just drunk it myself.  But lo and behold, a fantastic loaf of bread was pulled from oven a mere hour from the time I started making the dough.  No kneading, no rising, no punching...and I had warm, crusty, buttery bread.  I'll leave that kneading/punching/rising to those gluttons looking for punishment.

Wheat Beer Bread

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups wheat flour
4 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1 12oz bottle of beer (I had Yeungling on hand, so that's what I used.  It's kind of a heavy, amberish beer and definitely lent a stronger beer flavor to the bread.  I think next time I'll try something a little lighter)
1/4 cup butter, melted

-Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease one loaf pan.
-Combine all the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl.
-Stir in the beer until a stiff batter forms (arm workout!).  I didn't have to use my hands to mix the dough, but go ahead if you feel it needs it.
-Scrape the dough into the prepared loaf pan, pour the melted butter over the top, and pop it in the oven for 50-60 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.  I believe I left my loaf in there for 55 minutes total.

And you're done!

Tips and Tidbits:

If wheat bread isn't your thing, you can use 3 cups of all-purpose flour.  I've also heard of people substituting honey for the brown sugar, but I haven't tried that yet.  A recipe that I've found for honey beer bread can be found here.

This bread makes excellent toast.  I keep a set of chopsticks on hand though to dig it out of the toaster when it's done.  The beer bread doesn't rise a whole lot and therefore makes it a little short for the standard toaster.  Those of you with toaster ovens can skip the chopsticks step.  :)

This dough is incredibly versatile, and I think any number of add-ins could get you a very different, yet still tasty, loaf of bread.  In the future I'm going to try adding some fresh chopped garlic, parsley, and maybe some parmesan cheese.  I also think this bread would be really good with some cinnamon mixed into the dough (maybe some raisins?), omit the butter on top and sprinkle generously with a cinnamon/sugar mix to form a sweet little crust on top.  You could also try experimenting with different types of beer.  I've heard of people using everything from pumpkin beer to Guiness, so the possibilities are endless.  For those you that prefer to not use beer at all, I've heard that ginger ale or Sprite is a good substitute.  Your bread will probably be quite a bit sweeter though.