As a follow-up-follow-up to my No-Knead Bread recipe, this addition.
I carried through on my threat to replace all the moisture in this recipe with a more robust beer. And, in my tradition of not doing anything by halves, I used some Ninkasi Total Domination IPA. This is one of the hoppier beers you’ll find in non-specialty groceries, and I thought it would be a good test to see if there was an acceptable outer limit to the hops flavoring that this recipe can take.
As usual, I went with 500g flour to 308-310g liquid. The long rise went well, and it baked up (in a covered pot) as well as any other variation I’ve tried. What we came up with was a very beery bread, with good texture and nice big artisanal bubbles inside. The crust was chewy without being tough or crackly. In short, another good bread.
Except for the hops. This experiment proved that there is, indeed, an acceptable outer limit to the hops flavor a bread can accept, and as much as I like this IPA as a beer, it is outside that limit for bread making.
The intense hops flavor imparted a delayed but lingering, top-of-the-palate bitterness that just didn’t work. I even wondered if, properly paired, it might be a good addition to a meal and decided, no, it isn’t. It was just too much.
So, lesson learned. Nice malty beers or clean, lightly-hopped pilsners/lagers all work fine, but the strong, knock-your-teeth-out IPAs are to be avoided.
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I live in Seattle, and we have a reputation for loving our coffee. I’m no different, however, I am not a purist by any means. I can’t tell if you brewed it with tap water or distilled water or filtered water or Artesian spring water, and unless your tap water is really awful, I bet you can’t either.
I’ve tried almost every brewing method. I’ve tried brewing it cowboy-style in an open saucepan (toss in an eggshell to make the grounds sink), which I do not recommend, and for years we simply stuck with our standard drip-maker and a small Braun espresso machine.
For pure outlandishness, I have also tried the Presso® espresso maker, which works solely on muscle power. A hand-pulled demitasse is pretty cool, and it cleans up pretty easily, too. It wasn’t expensive, and it’s very solidly built, so I’ll keep it around.
