I am a therapeutic foster parent, which means I’m adventuring through this storm with a high school sophomore as my first mate! Being stuck at home makes therapeutic parenting a bit tricky because it removes a lot of the little tricks and strategies I use to keep things going well for me and my kiddo.
One major issue is food. I had a bunch of explanation here about exactly how and why food is an issue; then realized that’s not relevant. Suffice it to say that he really likes bread and any bread-like product (bagels, garlic toast, crackers, tortillas, etc.) and we have been out of those for about a week and a half now. Which has been, therapeutically speaking, a huge bummer.
Two days ago, I was planning to make spaghetti with meatballs for dinner, and thought that it would go so much better if I could pair it with some garlic toast, which he loves. It would break up the monotony of so much spaghetti, show good faith on my part, and be a good treat on a very difficult day.
I thought: I’ll make some bread! How hard can it be? People have been making bread for eons. All you really need are flour, yeast, and water, right?
There were two problems with my plan: One, I had no flour in the apartment. Two, I had no yeast. I might be good in the kitchen, but turning water into garlic toast is a bit beyond my capabilities at the moment.
So I did what I always tell my youths to do: Stop, Slow Down, Think. I figured I must have something bread-able in this kitchen. I’m a Jew who grew up in the desert. The art of making do is in my bones.
I looked through my cabinets. Bingo: a giant box of Bisquick, which my mother always kept around when I was growing up, so now I always have it in my house. (Becoming a parent makes you realize all the little Family Truths that create your unique conception of how humans live. One of mine, apparently, is “always keep a bunch of Bisquick around.” I mostly use it to make pancakes.)
I googled for recipes to make bread with Bisquick. A lot use yeast — nope. A bunch more use eggs and/or milk. Also not options. We were fresh out of eggs, and milk is for more important things in my house (without milk, we can’t make mac and cheese, and then we’re really in trouble). I kept googling until I found a recipe that only used beer, Bisquick, and sugar.
Thinking I didn’t have any beer, I double checked the fridge anyway. I don’t drink beer, and I’m not supposed to keep alcohol in the house for foster parent reasons — a sign posted on my front door asks guests to ensure they didn’t leave any leftovers. However, thanks to some quarantine miracle, there was one giant bottle of some fancy beer behind the bbq sauce in the fridge door.
Now we’re in business. The recipe looked incredibly simple: mix the Bisquick, sugar, and beer. Pour into a loaf pan and bake.
I mixed up the dough. The beer bubbled and fizzed, which gave me a lot of confidence that it was working well as a replacement for yeast.
The recipe said to use a pretty large amount of butter to grease “only the bottom” of the loaf pan. Butter is also high value around here and I didn’t want to use any of it for this bread experiment, so I figured some canola oil (which I have a ton of, and which, unlike butter, cannot be used to make mac and cheese) would suffice. I swirled some around the bottom of the loaf pan.
This would be the first of my many mistakes.
I poured my beery batter into the loaf pan, on top of the canola oil, and put it in the oven to bake. Since the recipe said to bake for 50–55 minutes, I set a timer for 50 minutes and figured I’d check it then.
I then proceeded to live in ignorant bliss for 50 minutes, unaware of the horrors awaiting me.
At the 50 minute mark, I went to check on the bread. It had risen in the pan and assumed a “loaf” shape, which felt pretty exciting to me. But it was getting burnt and blackened around the edges. I figured that meant it was done, if not over-done, and took it out of the oven.
Since I was also making spaghetti, the loaf went unmolested until it would have been time to start getting garlic bread ready. At that moment, I tried to tip the bread out of the loaf pan, expecting it to come out in a shape resembling a loaf of bread that might then be sliced, and buttered, and toasted with garlic and salt, and provided to one’s child alongside spaghetti.
Instead, it fell onto the cutting board in a soggy, crumbly pile that looked like, as one friend of mine put it after seeing a photo, “cat puke.”
I thought, well, I’m not presenting anything to Paul Hollywood. Maybe it looks a mess, but tastes okay?
It did not taste okay.
I tried one bite, and it was perhaps one of the nastiest things I have ever eaten. It tasted like the bitterness of beer with the texture of sodden bread. I choked down two bites before determining that it was basically inedible.
Thinking that perhaps it was just my dislike of beer, I offered a bite to my kiddo, saying that I’d tried to make bread and thought it came out badly but wanted his opinion. He took a bite, then spit it back out into his hand and looked at me with disgust and betrayal on his face.
I just made him spaghetti.
But I wondered — was any of this salvageable? I like a good culinary challenge, and I was really looking forward to some tasty buttery bread. The photos and comments on the recipe all seemed promising! My baker friend, upon hearing that it had a strong beer taste and was soggy, thought it seemed underbaked. How was that possible, I wondered, if the edges were burning?
Turns out, substituting canola oil for butter had been a problem. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that the oil had pooled at the edges, floated up with the wet batter, and caused the borders of the loaf to blacken far before the rest of the bread was done.
I wanted to try baking it a bit longer, but there was no way I could get the whole mess back into the loaf pan. I also knew I’d need to add a serious amount of sweetness and/or butter to offset the awful bitterness. (I considered trying to make some kind of bread pudding, making use of its denseness and just drowning it in sugar and cinnamon, but back to the milk and eggs issue. Same for french toast.)
A major chunk of it was still in the loaf pan; that just went back into the oven. The rest, which was lying in a pile of disaster crumbles on my cutting board, I spread out on a baking sheet. Then I microwaved some sweet yogurt butter to melted, and brushed the butter over the layer of proto-bread bits. Back in the oven they went!
The result was not exactly good, but it was far more palatable than the initial catastrophe. It was still bitter, but the hop flavor wasn’t quite as overpowering, taking it to “doesn’t taste great” which was an improvement from the previous “I can’t eat this.”
It tasted like beer-flavored bread with some dry burnt parts and some soggy parts. The handful of “just-right” bits, which tasted like buttery toast with a beery aftertaste, were pretty okay. It was also quite filling. I ended up eating it in bed off a sloth-themed Christmas plate because that’s the kind of life I want to live right now.
Since I had another serving of beer (the bottle contained two of what the recipe called for) and a boatload of Bisquick, I decided to try again two days later. I added a bunch more sugar and then some honey into the batter.
When it came out, the bread did actually hold a loaf shape, but it was still too wet — though somewhat closer to “pound cake” than “drowned dinner roll” in texture. It was still too beery and bitter for my taste, but the extra sugar and honey was definitely an improvement. (Although “better than my first effort” was not a very high bar.)
I managed to get something approximating slices out of it and put them in a frying pan with some butter, then coated the top with cinnamon sugar. Kiddo ate a few bites of the new concoction but still didn’t like it. I ate it for breakfast and it was pretty alright!
Anyway, now I am out of beer, thank God. I managed a 6am grocery run this morning, so now we have some actual bread, though I will probably keep eating this stuff for breakfast until it runs out.
Click here for Part Two of my baking misadventures!
