Single Entity

It came to me in a delirium of sickness and America’s Next Top Model marathons. The idea hung around for days; I kept coming back to it, fantasizing about it, and refining it. It seemed like the Holy Grail of baking to me where I lay on the couch with cough drops and tissues strewn around me: beer and bacon bread. When I came out of my self-imposed quarantine, I began to strategize more carefully. Eventually I settled on a rye bread recipe to corrupt for my own purposes. I thought that the richness and the coffee and cocoa flavors would complement the bacon. To go along with that, I wanted to find a stout with coffee and smoke flavors and tie all those flavors together. I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for* so I eventually settled on the smoked porter from Stone Brewing Company and Rogue’s chocolate stout.



I used a recipe for Steakhouse Black Bread as a starting point. The recipe as I made it is thus:

Ingredients
1/3 cup coffee, cool-ish
¼ cup Stone smoked porter
¾ cup Rogue chocolate stout (you can mess around with your beers and your combinations. I had no idea what I was doing)
¼ cup whatever molasses was in the cupboard
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup rye flour
2 cups bread flour
1 ½ tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1 ½ teaspoons salt
1 packet of yeast (about 1 tablespoon)
Some bacon, cooked and torn into bits (use as much as you want. I used a lot)


Directions:
1) Combine dry ingredients and bacon. Mix in wet ingredients.
2) Cover bowl with a towel and let it rise for a couple hours (maybe go run a mile while it rises so you can eat it in good conscience).
3) Preheat the oven to 425° F.
4) Shape bread into loaf (I do this on a pizza peel sprinkled heavily with cornmeal but you can also do it on a baking sheet). Add flour to the outside as you work with it so it doesn’t stick.
5) Make a couple of slashes on top of your loaf with a knife and brush the outside with olive oil or a beaten egg, then let it rise until the oven is ready.
6) If you’re doing this on a baking sheet, pop it in the oven. If you have a baking stone, slide your loaf from the peel to the baking stone. Mine always gets deformed when I do this, but such is life. I’ve also recently discovered that putting a pan of water on the bottom rack of the oven while your bread bakes makes for incredible crust. Do it. Really. Bake for about 35 minutes or until it sounds hollow when tapped (be careful—I burned the top of mine). Garnish with bacon.




And voila! Bacon beer bread. I didn’t love it at first, but then I started cutting really thin slices, and somehow that enabled me to taste all the flavors, and it was almost exactly what I’d hoped and dreamed. A worthwhile experiment.


*I think I’ve been ruined for stout forever, actually. A few weeks ago I tried Deschutes’ Abyss at a Seattle Beer Week event, and it was fantastic. I don’t even really like stouts, but that one single-handedly brought me over to the dark side (ha! Get it? Dark side? Like stouts are dark and normally I drink lighter beers?). I have been pining for it since then, and nothing else lives up to it.