Week 2: Guiness Stout

Well, since two out of the five votes cast for the next beer to go into the bread were for Guiness, Guiness it is!

Now, as anyone who actually knows me can attest, Guiness is my favorite beer of all. I can't even remember when I discovered it, though I'm pretty sure it was sometime at Beaudacious Bard College, just down Route 9G from the first beer/liquor superstore I'd ever seen, the marvelous BevWay (anyone know if they're still there? I mean, alcohol is a permanent sure-thing-seller, but still...). I love everything about it, watching the "waterfall" as it settles into a glass if it's been properly poured, its magnificent richness (my good friend The Sewer King calls it a "pork chop in a glass," as I'm sure many others do), its darkness and depth, its slight, coffee-like bitterness... Oh, I'm starting to regret my spontaneous decision to use the last bottle of the six-pack to make another loaf of bread.

Yes, bread. This is a blog about bread. Made from beer.

So how does the pork chop in a glass do as a bread ingredient?

Very well indeed.

Naturally Guiness bread has a lovely dark color inside and out. There is more of a contrast between its crust (and this recipe seems always to generate a lovely, crisp crust) and interior in terms of hue, but both partake in different shades of the same golden brown of the Newcastle Brown Bread. The bread looks like it would be a heavy, dense, rye-ish concoction but actually has a nice, light texture and is just moist enough to please a bread nut like YHBBB.* The flavor, too, is a bit of a surprise; the aforementioned coffee-like bitterness is there only as a hint and is apparent mostly in the crust.

Figuring Guiness Bread would have a strong flavor, I chose to play it off against a very different flavor for dinner. Alongside a West Lake Beef Soup (to be found in Martin Yan's CULINARY JOURNEY THROUGH CHINA, it features [homemade] beef broth, ground beef, julienned leeks, egg whites, carrots, white pepper and two different soy sauces) the Bread held its own but didn't compete so much as complete. That didn't sound pretentious at ALL, did it?

A second loaf was meant to keep the leftover soup company, and did so to a degree, but it mostly disappeared in random nibbling to enjoy its flavor over the course of a day or so. As I said, I like bread!

*YHBBB=Your Humble Beer Bread Blogger