Beer bread

I’m always on the lookout for easy recipes with a big payout – where homemade is clearly superior to store-bought. Fresh-baked bread, hot from the oven, with a pat of butter melting into it? Yes please.

So I love this recipe for beer bread, since it’s one of the easiest recipes I’ve seen in a while, and it results in a tasty loaf of bread just an hour later. Perfect for a snowy day like today – since it uses ingredients you most likely already have in the house, and what’s better than eating a slice of warm, fresh bread while watching the snow fall?

A quick search of the web reveals that this is a pretty common recipe, using the same key ingredients in slightly different combinations. There are even sites where you can purchase beer bread mix (“just add beer”), which I suppose is a testament to either our collective laziness or the fact that some of us don’t own measuring cups?

Thanks to my mom, this version has a variation I’ve not seen online – the addition of wheat germ for extra flavor and texture. (And apparently it’s healthy!) In terms of what beer to use, it depends on what you have on hand, and I imagine it’s a similar philosophy to cooking with wine – cook with what you’d like to drink.

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2 ¾ cups sifted flour
¼ cup wheat germ
¼ cup sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 bottle of beer (12 oz)
Butter (for loaf pan and topping)

1) Mix the dry ingredients, add the beer, stir to incorporate

2) Put batter in buttered loaf pan, top with a few pats of butter (optional)

3) Bake at 350 for 45-60 minutes (check after 45-50 minutes to see if knife comes out clean)