Recipes: Bintang Beer Bread

The interest to make homemade bread started for couple of reasons. I have got a lot of time on hand so wanted to try something new, apart from run-of-the-mill cooking and baking cookies/cakes. I also have an idiosyncratic allergy to wheat (as confirmed by skin-prick test) which is kinda peculiar. Because you would think I can't take anything that's wheat-based but somehow some wheat products are less allergenic than others. So it's a bit of a minefield for me. For all I know I could be allergic to some preservatives but I'm a bit blase to do another test. Maybe homemade bread solves the problem because no preservatives right? As for the wheat part, well we shall see about that.

I started following these 2 food blogs Rasa Malaysia and its sister site Gourmand Recipes, and stumbled across this idiot-proof (so I thought by just looking at the method) beer bread recipe which requires no yeast at all. Since I have no experience working with yeast, i thought "why not try this out". Hence earlier last week, I went shopping for all the required baking tools and ingredients and last Saturday was Attempt No. 1.

It was disastrous. I got a beer brick instead. Haha. Halfway into baking, the gas oven ran out of gas! And poor bread was sitting in the oven for a good 20 minutes cooling off. But I guessed that didn't factor too much (maybe it should be "at all" hehe) into the failure of Attempt No.1 when I realised belatedly last night that I had used the wrong ingredient right from the start: baking soda instead of baking powder. Didn't realised that baking soda and baking powder are two different thing altogether *sheepish blush* ;p

So here I am today, on my 2nd attempt. Turned out lovely. This is my first time eating beer bread and it's a crusty and rather dense loaf. This recipe (below) yielded a bread which is slightly sweet, so maybe I will reduce the sugar by 1-2 tablespoon at my next attempt. But otherwise I'm quite pleased with the result. And you can smell a hint of beer in it also. :)

Basic Beer Bread

3 cups of flour (the way to measure this is to spoon the flour into measuring cup to avoid packed flour)
3 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon salt
1/4 cup sugar
1 can of beer
1/4 cup melted butter (about 50g of butter and 20 seconds on the microwave)

- Preheat oven to 190 Celcius or 375 Farenheit
- Combined all dry ingredient in a mixing bowl
- Add in beer and stir lightly with a wooden spoon until you get a lumpy batter-like consistency
- Pour into a greased loaf and add melted butter to the mixture
- Bake for 1 hour, remove from pan and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes

This is the basic recipe. You can make variations to this recipe by adding grated cheese and herbs instead of butter or use different type of beers. Which I'm going to try out at my next attempt.