getting my oats

I assume literally everybody had a go at making some sort of bread during the COVID-19 lockdown, right? There was a whole subculture (no pun intended) that sprang up around sourdough bread, including the best ways to ensure the capture of the airborne yeast that makes sourdough starter work. Other, if you will, avenues (what, your hairy avenue, etc.) are available for yeast acquisition, for instance if you are lucky enough to be the owner of a vagina you can harvest yeast from there, especially if you happen to be suffering from a conveniently-timed yeast infection. Intriguingly, it does appear to also be possible for the process to run in reverse, i.e. for you to catch a vaginal yeast infection from bread-making, although that does raise some interesting questions about how the yeast transference occurred. 

As an aside, if you want an even more extreme method of making bread rise, try making some gangrene bread.

Anyway, as much as I like eating sourdough bread I am far too lazy to get into the minutiae of starter fermentation and all that malarkey. We did nevertheless have a couple of goes at making bread during lockdown, firstly some fairly standard white bread (i.e. the sort that you make with the yeast that comes in a packet) which was fine, although we were a bit cavalier with the proving process so it was a bit denser than it might have been. 

The bread-making process isn't that onerous, honestly, but the yeast thing plus the multiple provings, putting a towel over it, leaving it the airing cupboard, etc., is a bit time-consuming, so I was interested to hear that you can make bread with beer. The relevant paragraph from that linked page is this one:

There are two kinds of beer bread, both of which are incredibly simple. In fact, my favourite way is so simple a child could do it (disclaimer: don’t let a child do it). All you need to do is mix a 330ml bottle of beer, 375g of self-raising flour and 3 teaspoons of sugar in a bowl with a spoon. Pour it into a bread tin, top with a drizzle of melted butter and bake at 180°C/360°F for about 50 minutes, or until golden and crisp on top.

The results don't look massively different from the regular bread, and taste pretty similar too. I can't remember what sort of beer I used for the one in the picture, but you can imagine getting very different results from a lager or a light dry IPA, and a malty winter ale, or Guinness. 

The upside here is that it's incredibly easy to make and doesn't require any proving; just mix, in the tin, in the oven, done. The downside, of course, is that you'll have to sacrifice a bottle or can of beer to the process that you could otherwise have enjoyed in the proper traditional God-fearing way, i.e. by drinking it.

Anyway, it was perfectly nice, though I haven't repeated the experiment, partly for the reasons above, and partly because post-lockdown we now have nice convenient access to bread shops and the like. But I am always intrigued by a recipe that seems to bypass the sorcery and voodoo incantations associated with making regular bread, and I was therefore intrigued by a recipe that flashed past my eyes in a YouTube short (or possibly a Facebook reel) the other day. It's basically this one but I'll reproduce it here as it's very simple:

• 300g porridge oats
• 500g Greek-style natural yogurt
• mixed seeds
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1-2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• a pinch of salt

Seed-wise my current preference is a generous couple of spoonfuls of chia seeds in the mix, and then a generous sprinkling of pumpkin and sunflower seeds on top. Some recipes with near-identical ingredient lists appear to produce pale bread with a darker crust; mine is quite dark throughout. 

Essentially it's a variant of soda bread with the yogurt substituted for the more usual buttermilk and the flour/oats combo adjusted so that it's 100% oats. Anyway, the important thing is that the method is simple: chuck everything in a bowl, mix well, scrape it into a loaf tin and bake at around 180°C (gas mark 4) for about 45-50 minutes.

It's very tasty and lends itself to sweet or savoury applications: I've had it with goat's cheese and houmous on it, but also toasted with some honey on and both were equally nice. You'll recall that we have done bread-making using yogurt here before, but that was flatbread which is generally easier.