Whenever I am flipping through a recipe book its safe to assume that "beer" in the title of the recipe will usually get me to stop and give it a once over. Last night the fennel beer bread recipe was no different. The deciding factor was that I had already opened a beer to marinade the steak that I was cooking for dinner, and this recipe seemed like a perfect place for the rest of it.
The titular flavors are beer (which, unless you use a very hardy or aggressively flavored beer, just causes the bread to be incredibly soft) and fennel seeds. I had only previously used fennel seeds (crushed) in my mom's secret pizza sauce recipe so I wasn't sure how whole fennel seeds in dough would turn out. Interestingly the fennel, while detectable, is fairly overpowered by the mustard the recipe calls for (that and the garlic salt).
Lesson for the day: never assume you have all the ingredients.
I thought, after the NFC championship game, a day that will forever live infamy, that a friend of mine brought over a big bottle of dijon-style mustard to go with all the bratwurst and polish sausages he grilled. I couldn't find it...and spent a good ten minutes wandering around the kitchen muttering "why is the mustard gone." So I had to substitute in half of the mustard requirement with yellow mustard instead.
Anyways, as usual, the recipe is for a loaf of bread and I broke it out into rolls. I did video several of the roll making techniques (not as easy as it sounds with a camera phone in one hand and trying to one-hand the dough in the other...) I'll clean those up and post them this evening (maybe) in the Video Techniques section of the blog.
I've added Fennel Beer Bread to the Recipe page in case anyone has the same desire to incorporate beer into anything edible.
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