The bread of the month for February was Beer Bread. I wasn’t really sure how I’d feel about this bread because, well, I kind of think beer is gross. However, I’ve heard good things about beer bread, so I gave it a whirl. Turns out beer bread is really yummy. Also, beer bread might be the easiest bread in the world to make. I got the recipe from Honest Fare. She even gives you a printable recipe here: Beer Bread. It literally took mere minutes to make this bread. It’s sweet with just a hint of beer flavor. I took Honest Fare’s recommendation and ate it with a little freshly ground pepper. Yummy! Later in the evening Matt and our friend Whitney couldn’t stop themselves and they ate the whole top half of the bread. Yes, that’s right, the top half. They scalped the poor thing, but it was confirmation for me that this bread is worth making again. 🙂

The Bread of the Month for January was tortillas. Delicious, delicious tortillas. What happened to November and December you may ask. (Although, probably not 🙂 ) Well, in November I learned how to make pie crust from scratch. Who knew that would be so easy? In December I was pretty focused on cookies. I learned how to make some chocolate biscotti that were pretty yummy. I decided that since those are kind of baked in a loaf, they’d count as bread. It’s cheating a little, but I’m OK with that. Given the holiday craziness in both of those months, I did not do a great job of documenting the process. Not so with tortillas!

My friend Melissa is the resident tortilla expert, so she kindly agreed to come share her knowledge with me. We decided to make both corn and flour tortillas. It was a tortilla making extravaganza!

We’ve both been dreaming of corn tortillas. I thought I’d found masa, but I think maybe it’s just corn flour. It was really fine and the tortillas were decidedly unsuccessful. We did learn a few things along the way, though.

1. Corn tortillas need to be rolled or pressed very thin.
2. Wetter dough works better than drier dough.
3. Steaming the tortilla before frying it is KEY.
4. Rolling or pressing corn tortillas works better between a thin cloth than it does between plastic.
5. Salt is important.

We’re not giving up on corn tortillas, but for now, they are out of our reach. Sigh.

The flour tortillas, however, were a huge success. A huge delicious success! We went for the straight white flour tortilla this time, but I’ll be trying for wheat very soon. There really is no excuse for me to buy tortillas ever again. Not only are they ridiculously easy to make, they taste a million times better than store bought. Yes, a million. At least.

Here’s the recipe:

3 cups white flour (2 cups white, 1 cup wheat for wheat tortillas)

1 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup vegetable oil or shortening (we used oil & it was perfect)

1 cup warm water

Combine flour, salt & oil or shortening. Mix until crumbly. Add warm water. Mix until a ball forms. Knead for 5 minutes. Cover and rest for 30 minutes up to 2 hours. Roll out on a floured surface. Be sure to roll them fairly thin. Cook in a nonstick pan.

Note: We tried to cook them in my cast iron pan. This didn’t work very well, but that is most likely because my pan is pretty trashed.

A few more pictures here: Bread of the Month