Beer bread

But first, a musical interlude. Which was never intended to be a regular feature here, but it felt relevant, and this is not the blog of impulse control. Here's to Beer That Tastes Like Beer.

Much as the Gargoyle is fond of belting along with the rollicking tune, especially when it's performed by one's favorite pirates, it is an act of total hypocrisy. This castle monster actually prefer white ales and wheat beers and Belgian ales and sours (not necessarily fruited), and most emphatically not anything that can be described as hop-forward. Or even especially malty. Beers that taste as unlike beers as possible. The Human Spouse is rather more into a more traditional amber glass of wholesome cheer, but hops are not his thing either.

The Spouse opened a nice bottle of ale that tastes like beer, took a swig and passed it over:

"Do you like this?"

"Nope."

The opened bottle stared accusingly.

"Beer bread?"

"The oven in this heat?"

"Um... Air fryer beer bread? That's gotta be a thing."

It was a thing. Sort of. The first found recipe provided the following suggestion: Set air fryer to 330 and air fry for anywhere from 12 to 45 minutes depending on how much batter you use". Naturally without any guidance of how to compute the dependency.

But, aha! Our particular air fryer comes with a "Bake" setting, which we've never yet used. What if we just pretend that it's a tiny oven and use normal oven settings?

There are lots and lots of 3 ingredient beer bread recipes. Most of them suggest 3 cups of flour to a bottle of beer.

The third ingredient is usually some variable amount of sugar. Other recipes omitted the sugar altogether and their third ingredient was melted butter. We settled on reducing suggested sugar to 1 tbsp so it's not too sweet and no butter beyond lubricating the loaf pan.

But oh. Self-rising flour. We don't have that. Well, worry not, 1 cup of self-rising flour is 1 cup of all-purpose flour plus... some disagreements on exact ratios, but we went with "add 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder and 1/4 teaspoon fine salt". Mathy math math, 3 cups flour, 4 1/2 tsp baking powder, 3/4 tsp salt.

But oh. No baking powder either. Well, worry not, substitute each teaspoon of baking powder in the recipe with 1/4 teaspoon baking soda and 1/2 teaspoon vinegar. Mathy math math, 1 1/8 (so close enough to 1) tsp soda, 2 1/4 tsp vinegar.

To summarize:

Whatcha got	Units	Whatcha need	So you're gonna need
Self-rising flour	cups	3
All-purpose Flour	cups	1 to 1	3
Salt	tsp	1/4 per cup flour	3/4
Baking Powder	tsp	1 1/2 per cup flour	4 1/2
or Baking Soda	tsp	1/4 per tsp baking powder	1 1/8
with Vinegar	tsp	1/2 per tsp baking powder	2 1/4

Except that instead of writing these things down as above or using a spreadsheet like a sensible creature of darkness the Gargoyle got overconfident, attempted mental arithmetic and dropped a few multipliers along the way, so this was definitely not what actually ended up in the mixing bowl.

But oh. We only found 2 cups of all-purpose flour in the flour container. The Spouse valiantly reduced the available beer to 2/3 of a bottle to match.

He then found more flour and added one more cup.

The resulting dough was clearly lumpy and incorrect, and opening a second beer seemed somehow wrong, so the difference was made up with that boringest of substances, water. Which at least made the dough be actually a dough, but no doubt its chemical composition at this point bore incredibly little resemblance to the original intent.

Bread that tastes like bread

Verdict: What we got half hour later (plus 15 minutes to rest and cool) was most assuredly a beer bread. It wasn't the prettiest or best risen of beer breads, but also not the least so. It tasted beer bready and delicious, and was perfect with a slab of butter on it.

Lessons learned, though:

• Next time pull up an actual spreadsheet to do math shenanigans rather than trying to multiply a chain of awkward fractions entirely in one's head

• do not imbibe spare ingredients until after the recipe has been put together

• But the Bake setting of the air fryer - totally a win.