Porter and hops bread (World Bread Day)

A recurring theme of this blog is the relationship between bread and beer. Both are among the oldest known cultivated foods and exist in our culture in a kind of symbiosis. We rely on fermentation to give us both products, and for most of history the brewery was close to the bakery ... and often the same enterprise. So my World Bread Day post has to also involve beer.

This is the beeriest bread I've made yet. It doesn't just contain beer as the liquid, it is also raised with beer yeast and has added malt and hops.

I hope it's not too bitter. When I've used beer yeast in the past I could detect residual hop bitterness in the finished bread. That didn't bother me but some people might dislike it. This one actually has dried hops added to the dough too and I wonder if it'll retain any of the wonderful hop aroma, or just their bitterness.

The malt should give munchy bits, dietary fibre and possibly unwanted enzymatic activity that will devour the entire dough during the night, leaving only a puddle of sugar syrup.

If you brew, this is an easy bread to make, because you have the malt and hops, leftover yeast and spoiled beer handy. If you don't, it's probably more trouble than it's worth.

450g white flour
50g spelt flour
20g yeasty gunk from the bottom of the fermenting bucket
13g salt
20g crushed pale malt
2g crushed hops (I used Boadicea)
320g of some unsuccessful home-brewed porter beer

Straight dough, no faffing about. Bake it as you like it.



The hops give the bread a distinctive, though not very pronounced, hoppy aroma, and also, as I thought it might, a bitter finish, which is quite nice once you get used to it. You probably need to like hops a lot though. The crumb is relatively heavy for a white-flour loaf, but soft and moist; the crust is soft and chewy.

Porter, fish, rice and seaweed

At the farmers' market on Saturday, I came across a stall selling seaweed. It's the first time I'd seen it there and of course I had to go and have a chat.

I bought some sea lettuce and some kelp. The sea lettuce looks like, well, lettuce, while the kelp is large brown sheets resembling floppy celluloid.

I had a couple of mackerel fillets as well which I thought would go nicely with seaweed and rice. I chopped the seaweed (warning: fresh kelp is the slimiest substance in the universe) and sauteed it with onion, ginger and green bell pepper while I cooked some rice. When the seaweed was cooked, I removed it and briefly seared the mackerel just enough to cook it. I trust my fishmonger but I'm not sure he guarantees that things are fresh enough to eat raw. Then just a quick seasoning with soy sauce and vinegar and a dab of wasabi on the side.

I had a bottle of smoked oatmeal porter with this, because it's precisely the sort of combination I've wanted to try for ages. Did it work? Well, it worked with the seaweed and vinegared rice. I wouldn't go so far as to say it worked with the mackerel, but it stood up to it better than any other beer would. There was a slight metallic tang, but while that is usually disastrous for me, in this case it was quite pleasant. The seaweed and rice combination was much nicer, though. Against the acid of the vinegar the sweetness of the beer shone through, and in return brought the seaweed's marine, iodiney flavours to the fore.

Barm and Porter musings

I have been pondering why bakers, apparently around 1800, stopped just using yeast from the brewery and switched to barms.

Everything I have read on the subject of barms suggests that hop bitterness was considered a necessary evil by bakers at the time. They didn't like it, but the hops were needed to stop the barm spoiling.

I had in my mind that there must have been some significant change in the way beer was brewed that forced bakers to switch.

I don't know whether there was a sudden shift to using more hops around that time, which would have increased the bitterness.

The only other idea is that at that time porter was the dominant brewing style, in London at least. Porter had already been popular for decades prior to 1800, but it was made with brown malt. The much more highly roasted black patent malt was invented in 1817, and the porter brewed using this might have given the yeast a burnt, toasty flavour that bakers didn't want in their bread.

Could there be something in this theory? I think it is most probably rubbish, but someone else may know something I don't.