Cheesy Beer Bread

As you all know I LOVE to bake bread.  Sometimes in our busy life I am not able to find time to let bread rise for a couple hours. Yesterday I found a solution to this problem...BEER BREAD!  This delicious bread is a very simple type of batter bread that doesn't need any time to rise.  In fact (as you may have imagined) the beer is used as the yeast. The other benefit is that the ingredients to this bread are already in your home...probably. One think that drives me crazy is having to purchase all sorts of special ingredients for a simple recipe. So, this experiment turned out well and got two thumbs up (one from me and one from Dave, of course).  

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/2 cup chopped yellow onion (don't use purple onion it will look like moldy spots in the bread)

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

1 garlic clove, minced

3 cups all purpose flour

3 tablespoons sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup cheddar cheese

12 oz can or bottle of beer (lagers are best)

2 tablespoon melted butter, divided 

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

Heat oil in a small skillet at medium low heat.  Add onion to pan and cook until browned, stirring occasionally.  Add garlic and pepper cook just until garlic is fragrant about 1 minute.  

Add flour to a large mixing bowl.  Combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt and whisk together.  Make a well in the center of the mixture.  Add onion mixture, cheese and beer to flour mixture.  Stir just until incorporated.  

Spoon batter into a loaf pan coated with cooking spray.  Drizzle 1 tablespoon of butter over the batter.  Bake 35 minutes.  Drizzle remaining tablespoon of butter, bake 25 more minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.  Cool in pan and transfer to a wire rack after about 10 minutes of cooling.  

A few more delicious ideas - use 1/4 cup green onion and 1/4 jalapeno in place of onion.  Cook as you would onion.  Add Mexican cheese and Mexican beer such as Dos Equis  -  can't wait to try this one!!