Beer Bread (Oi Oi Oi)

That big crack down the middle, it wasn't intentional but it left a great place to shove the butter

‘Do you want some beer bread to go with your beer?’ my husband asked his Dad.

‘That sounds good,’ was the reply. And it was.

Another deceptively simple recipe with only four ingredients –one of them being a can of beer – came in the form of beer bread: flour, salt, sugar and beer. The recipe called for 375ml of Little Creatures Pale Ale, admittedly one of my favourites, but I didn’t have any in the fridge.

Is it still Aussie bread if you use a Dutch beer? That bit left in the cup was my tipple for the day

I did however, have a 500ml can of Dutch beer left behind from a BBQ and my powers of deduction told me that meant I could have a 125ml tipple while baking the bread.

For such an easy recipe I couldn’t even follow the most basic instruction: sifting the dry ingredients into a bowl. Admittedly I rarely sift things, but I had every intention to do so in the spirit of taking this Project seriously. The problem was that I only own one sieve and at that point in time it was sitting on the sink, filled with the remnants of my Maggi Noodle breakfast. I am all class on a Sunday.

I doubt my lack of sifting made a lot of difference to the end product, although I am not sure why it ended up with the shape of a mushroom cloud. The recipe didn’t say how long to knead it for, and since it didn’t have any yeast to activate, I figured a few minutes should be enough.

This is what it was meant to look like (image courtesy Jason Thomas)

Freshly baked bread tends to be a crowd pleaser, and when it’s made with beer it will outperform any boring cheese and crackers that it is up against. Perhaps due to my lack of sifting and impatience with kneading, it was quite dense but when we cracked it open and slathered on the butter it was declared a success. Even by the kids.

I figured that the 50 minutes in the oven should have burned off any of the alcohol by that stage, but just in case, I limited the amount of bread they were allowed.

Besides, it would have meant sharing.

My thoughts:

As the recipe suggests this loaf would be perfect for tearing up and dipping into a bowl of hot soup.

And it’s not really the type of bread you can wrap around a sausage. I found that one out the hard way.


Please contact me if you have any questions or would like to find more out about the recipe.