Beer Bread Experiments

In 2009, I had my first taste of beer bread, and it was delicious! It was a Tastefully Simple mix. I had never heard of Tastefully Simple. Earlier this year, one of my co-workers invited me to her Tastefully Simply party and I knew I needed to get some of the beer bread mix. In the mean time, someone had emailed a beer bread recipe to one of the listservs I'm on, so I decided to see how it compared, since it would be nice to have a more cost effective substitute. Then I came across a recipe online for a two ingredient beer bread so I decided I'd try that too. Over the last month I've baked (and eaten!) a lot of bread!

This is one of the Tastefully Simple loaves:

This produced the nicest loaf shape. It was the sweetest and had the softest crust.

These are the beer and self-rising flour loaves:

This recipe produced a salty loaf with crusty crust.

This recipe uses regular flour, baking powder, and brown sugar:

These loaves were also crusty, but had a sweeter taste due to the brown sugar. If I had read this recipe more closely before I tried the self-rising flour, I think I would have tried adding brown sugar to that recipe. I'm out of beer now, but if I make more bread I will use the self-rising flour with brown sugar simply because I have no other use for self-rising flour at the moment.