Beer Bread?

I've mentioned before that I grew up as an extraordinarily picky eater, and how it's been a long slow process to re-expose myself to foods I used to hate... but another aspect of basically only eating a handful of different things as a youngin' is that I keep running into fairly common things that I didn't even know existed. Alexandra Cooks has a recipe up today for a nice looking cheese soup and some beer bread. Beer bread I says? Yes, making liquid bread into actual bread... why... that's a damn good idea! It's a quick bread (that is, leavened with baking soda/powder instead of yeast) where you use the beer to provide a more sourdough-esque experience. Brilliant!

One of the things we've yet to successfully incorporate into our home cooking life is always having fresh bread to accompany our meals... how often we'll cook in a given week is just too unpredictable, at this point, to know whether we'll eat up a baguette before it gets stale. Anna will just freeze extra bread and then make it into toast for subsequent soups and stews... and that works quite well... but as nice as toast is at sopping up soup, sometimes you really want fresh bread for the task (or at least I do).

Of course, the choice between a yeast bread and a quick bread is no choice at all in my opinion... but find me a sourdough you can mix in 5 and bake in 40. Worth trying methinks... especially on those nights we're making a hearty winter dish and go "[Expletive Deleted]! We don't have any bread!"

beer bread photo by flickr user gin soak used under a Creative Commons license