Last weekend I decided to make soup and bread for lunch. I had a packet of diced vegetables that were called 'soup mix', the idea being you just bung them all in a pan with some stock. I'd planned to set my breadmaker machine the night before so we could have nice fresh bread in time for lunch - and completely forgot.
Was I going to have to give up on the idea of having fresh bread with soup (or send the reluctant other half out to buy some)? Surely there must be a quick bread recipe out there that I could make in a couple of hours from start to finish (I didn't get up very early on the Sunday morning so lunch was only a couple of hours away!). Luckily, there was: there are bread recipes you don't need to leave to prove, and this is one of them.
It's a recipe from the Telegraph for 'easy beer bread with parmesan and garlic'. I think the beer replaces yeast and all you have to do is mix everything and cook it for just under an hour.
I did change the recipe a fair bit as I didn't have buckwheat flour, polenta, fresh thyme and couldn't be bothered to go into the garden to see if I still had any rosemary (it was raining!), oh and I did't have any parmesan either! Instead I looked in the fridge to see what I did have and decided to create my own flavour of mature cheddar and chilli. I also forgot to add the little bit of butter at the end but it was fine without. So here's what I did:
Super-Fast Chilli and Cheese Beer Bread - an original recipe by Caroline Makes
260g strong white bread flour
100g wholemeal plain flour
1 tbsp. baking powder
60g caster sugar
3 cloves garlic, crushed
50g mature cheddar, diced
2 tsp Very Lazy chopped red chillis
300ml bottle beer
Preheat oven to 190C and grease a loaf tin. Mix all the dry ingredients.
Add the beer and mix in well
Spoon into the prepared loaf tin and bake in the oven for 50 minutes
In the meantime here is my soup mix, which I simply simmered with some vegetable stock until the veg was soft, then put it in a blender.
I added some more water as it was a bit thick
Here's the finished loaf of bread
The garlic, cheese and chilli flavours all came through really strongly, so this is a good bread to serve alongside a simple soup - one that perhaps doesn't have an overpowering flavour of its own.
Lunch! And possibly the fastest loaf of bread I've ever made.
I'm sending this to Bready Steady Go, hosted by Jen's Food and Michelle of Utterly Scrummy.
And also to Extra Veg, hosted this month by Elizabeth's Kitchen Diary on behalf of Michelle at Utterly Scrummy again, and Helen at Fuss Free Flavours.
