Nothing but Chocolate Beer Bread

Beer Details

• Beer Style: American Double / Imperial Stout
• 9.7
• 0
• Brewery: Smog City Brewing

Return to Obnoxious Eating

After a week away in Hong Kong sampling their finest craft beer and indulging in Dim Sum, Wontons, and plenty of roasted goose, the one thing I wanted was a little bit of overindulgence. I am talking about that feeling where you are full, but you say to yourself, “I’m down for dinner again.”

This is not healthy and my lower intestinal tract has been dealing with this for quite some time now, but the need to overindulge was necessary. Perhaps it is the American in me. So after the burritos and the In & Out, the next thing for me to consume was a beer bread. The most overindulgent (and one of the easier) recipes to make involve throwing chocolate on it. And that is what I did.

We are big fans of Smog City brewery and happy to see the Torrance area booming with craft beer these days. A while back, I created a chocolate recipe using their coffee porter. It was delicious, but nothing special (the bread that is). I feel like throwing chocolate on it is an easy out for the same recipe you have seen on this website ad nauseam which is why you don’t see the coffee porter beer bread recipe here.

However, coming from a culture of subtle eating back to America, what is better than throwing chocolate into flour and then throwing more chocolate on top of that. Since the coffee porter recipe wasn’t used, we went with Smog City’s The Nothing Imperial Stout.

Fake Brownies

This stout contains coffee flavors so it is not completely chocolate. Considering I didn’t want to overwhelm this bread with sugar so I used instant espresso powder to compensate for the low sugar. Overwhelming in chocolate, I decided to forgo adding baking powder. What is the purpose of this? Baking powder is a mix of cream of tatar and baking soda that, when combined, create a chemical reaction and makes pockets of co2 bubbles.

This is why you get these craters that looks like an explosion went off in your bread. By removing that from our recipe, our bread won’t rise as much and remain dense. But who wants a dense bread? Someone who wanted brownies, but didn’t want to make brownies. Think of this recipe as a poor man’s brownie. Similar to one of those quick coffee cup cake recipes, this recipe was not only intended for indulgence, but created out of convenience as well.

Crispy around the edges (from over greasing the pan), this assists in keeps our bread dense. It is a similar process to pan frying before baking. You lock everything in and don’t let anything seep out. This is still a bread unfortunately. But the melted chocolate chips along with the density of the bread certainly created something that satisfied my needs for brownies.

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Nothing but Chococolate Beer Bread ingredients

• 1/2 cup of butter
• 1 cup of sugar
• 3/4 teaspoons of salt
• 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon of espresso powder
• 2/3 cups of Hershey cocoa powder
• 1/2 cup of boiling Nothing Imperial Stout
• 1/2 cup of milk
• 1 1/4 cup of all purpose flour
• 3 eggs
• 6 ounce (half a bag) of chocolate chips

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Nothing but Chocolate Beer Bread directions

• Preheat oven to 350º Fahrenheit. Grease a 9 inch loaf pan. Open your imperial stout and pour 1 cup into a sauce pan. Let simmer until you have 1/2 cup of beer. Let simmer while you prep the dairy products.
• Add eggs, sugar, and vanilla extract and blend with a hand mixer. Add the milk and espresso powder and continue mixing.
• Pour half the flour into the mix and use a spatula to mix from here. After mixed, add the remaining flour and continue hand mixing.
• Add the boiling beer. Mix in some chocolate chips. Pour into your loaf pan and place in the oven for 60-70 minutes.

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