I have been fascinated with all the beautiful loaves of bread people have been baking during Covid-19. I suppose if there is a silver lining to these very uncertain times during the stay at home orders, it is that many people have turned to the art of baking and cooking. The posts that I love to see are these loaves of bread that are works of art. You know the ones with the gardenscapes made out of vegetables. My favorite photos have been the ones posted by Wildcraft Focaccia Company in Richmond Virginia. I reached out to ask permission to post some of his lovely bread photos. Here are some of their works of art, don’t you just love them? I will post mine further down in this post.
I wanted to make some lovely bread using theirs as my muse but due to food supply issues across the United States, yeast is sold out everywhere. After a bit of YouTube research, I found out that beer yeast can be substituted, which led me to an experiment to find out for myself if it works, and if so, is it better or the same as bread yeast? After all, I know from making beer, that yeasts do vary in flavor and in how they react once activated/pitched. Now all I had to do was go to a local brewing supply store. Well, again we are in Covid-19 so that means I had to order from my local brewing supply store Atlantic Brew Supply and arrange for a pick up of my order in the next week.
To be on the safe side I ordered two different kinds of beer yeast, a Belle Saison and a Belgium Abbey Ale. During this time my husband also ordered some instant bread yeast from Mexico on Amazon and I found a 3 pack of expired bread yeasts tucked behind some spices in my rack. Now it appears plenty of fun will ensue because we will make four loaves of Focaccia bread and share it with friends.
These were relatively easy to make. I had fun decorating them, even though mine are not quite as beautiful as the professionally baked loaves pictured above. If you want the recipe you can find it here on Love of Food Magazine.
As always I enlisted my husband to play taste-tester to see which he liked the best.
Baking Day and The Covid-19 Phase two plan to open some of our business establishments landed on the same day. I planned to take my bread to a local taproom with outside seating and put the employees of the Yacht Club Beverage House to the test. Let’s find out if they can guess which of the loaves of bread were made from the beer!
I felt like we needed another female perspective so I enlisted my friend Tina to taste the bread also and rate her favorites. Oddly she picked the exact same as I did!