Guinness Stout Bread with yeast – The Accidental Recipe Modified

Wednesday 8th June 2011
Recipe 20110608

I had to try this out. I wanted to make Guinness Stout bread for many weeks but never got round to it. Those people at Guinness Stout are experts at aroma and flavours so why not piggy back on their expertise. Furthermore Guinness Stout is a very good source of iron and most beers and stouts contain Vitamin B.

 

But let me apologise for the one week silence. I have had many duties that could not be put off any longer. I have cleaned up my apartment, too, but unfortunately in my eagerness to throw everything out I accidentally threw out my wheat germ. Until I get some more wheat germ, one of these days, you will find wheat germ missing from my recipes. I have not run the experiments on the bread flour (see how to make yeast bread rise more). Hopefully, there will be interesting results and I had made some adjustment to the Flat Loaf Plain Bread recipe (see how to make flat loaf plain bread with yeast) which should be out this coming week.

 

Types of Guinness Stout

Let’s get back to Guinness Stout. In Malaysia, we have a Guinness Stout factory located in PJ / Old Klang Road area. The Guinness Stout people have stopped supplying the original Guinness Stout. The Original Guinness Stout was nice and bitter … really bitter. Now days, they have been supplying a ‘Foreign Extra’ recipe. I found this a little sweet for my taste and after trying Royal Stout and then immediately drinking the Foreign Extra Guinness Stout, I found that the Foreign Extra Guinness Stout tasted as if honey had been added in. So my guess is that they are adding honey to the Original Guinness Stout recipe to make it into Foreign Extra Guinness Stout. I do not know why they call it Foreign Extra Guinness Stout because it is made here, locally, literally just outside my door.

 

Naming the Bread

 

I had to try it, adding the Guinness Stout to the bread recipe. Next time I will try Apple Cider in my bread recipe. When I was trying to sort out in my head how to make this recipe I was very worried of how bitter the bread could be. Then again I was not sure if it would be tasty bread so I added a lot of butter to the bread, to make it more like a bun recipe. Shall we call it a ‘Guinness Stout Bunny Bread Recipe’? Oh, don’t leave out the foreign extra in the recipe name … Foreign Extra Guinness Stout Bunny Bread recipe. Now I feel like a foreigner in my own country. Extra, extra foreign.

 

Here is the Foreign Extra Guinness Stout Bunny Bread recipe.

Item	Ingredients	Percentage	Weight		Weight
		(%)	(g)		oz.
Sponge
1	Bread Flour	100	300		10.56
3	Instant Dry Yeast	1	3		0.11
4	Sugar	5	15		0.53
5	Guinness Stout	80	240		8.45
After 1 hour of fermentation
Additives
6	Salt	1.5	4.5		0.16
7	Sugar	2	6		0.21
8	Butter	10	30		1.06
9	Olive Oil	2	6		0.21

 

 

Notice that this is an 80% water recipe but the water was replaced with Guinness Stout.

Photos and comments of the Foreign Extra Guinness Stout Bunny Bread recipe

Mix all the sponge dry ingredients.

 

 

Pour in the Foreign Extra Guinness Stout. The aroma that comes out of this mix was just gorgeous.

 

 

Fold in the sponge on itself and then allow it to proof for an hour.

 

 

After an hour it has not expanded that much but you will notice that it looks a bit wet.

 

 

Add the additives. It does look like a lot of butter and oil. I had mixed the virgin olive oil into the soft butter before adding it in.

 

 

Keep stabbing it and folding it to get the butter oil to mix into the sponge.

 

 

Put the dough into a baking tin to proof. This time around I had a small piece of baking paper at the bottom of the tin and greased the sides of the tin with butter instead of palm oil.

 

 

Now, here’s the thing about this recipe. I began this recipe in the evening and by 3am it had risen quite a bit. It needed more than seven hours to proof. I was not going to bake it at three in the morning so I left it and went to bed. When I woke up it had raised a little bit more. That is what too much butter or fats or oils do. The yeast doesn’t like too much oils or fats in its environment. They slow down the yeast a lot. Now I have learned something new. If you are going to add a lot of fats and oils, allow the sponge to ferment for more than one hour, at least two hours so that there yeast has time to multiply before the fats and oils are added in. Alternatively, you could add more yeast into the sponge.

 

 

The baked Foreign Extra Guinness Stout Bunny Bread. I baked it for 40 minutes at 220C (428F) to try to get it to rise faster. The more air there is in the bread the shorter is the baking time. The crust was firm and crunchy, but the bread, internally, had very little structural strength and very soft and I think that is due to the high butter content. You needed a sharp bread knife to saw through the crust but the crust was delicious. The Guinness Stout makes a very dark coloured crust.

 

 

Comments of Foreign Extra Guinness Stout Bunny Bread

I think if I had used less butter it would not have taken such a long time to rise. And if you are using the Original Guinness Stout, I would suggest adding 1 to 2 % extra sugar in the additives in the recipe. This Foreign Extra Guinness Stout Bunny Bread was not at all bitter to the taste. In fact on the first day the bread had a very slight sweet taste but on the second day after baking there was a very slight bitter taste. Interesting how the flavour changes over the days. It was quite nice bread and after trying all my breads, this was the first one my mom liked. Wow, it is difficult to please these old folks, now days.

 

I will definitely improve on this recipe and I am sure you guys and gals would be racing to improve it by leaps and bounds. Now you almost know how to make Foreign Extra Guinness Stout Bunny Bread …. Extra, extra foreign … Guinness Stout.

This article “How to make a Guinness Stout Bread with yeast” was researched and written by Peter Achutha