Four ingredients and less than an hour for some homemade bread? Count me in!
4-Ingredient Beer Bread
Credit: King Arthur

I'm a good cook but an absolutely pathetic baker (I've burned cut-and-bake cookies and you can just forget about the time I attempted sourdough.) It's probably because I don't like measuring out ingredients, but sometimes even I want an easy, stress-relieving kitchen activity to try during social distancing.

I had some self-rising flour in my pantry, so I looked up a no-knead bread recipe to use it up. I stumbled upon King Arthur's recipe for Classic Beer Bread (pictured above) and was immediately intrigued.

The recipe takes less than an hour, requires only four ingredients (self-rising flour, sugar, melted butter and beer) and doesn't need any special equipment. The best part? There's no kneading or waiting hours for your dough to rise—so it's the perfect recipe to tackle with kids (or baking-challenged folks like me). If you don't have self-rising flour, you can make your own with all-purpose flour, baking powder and salt. (Here's a handy recipe!)

I can honestly say the beer bread was delicious. And while there's a slight beer taste, it certainly isn't offensive or overly powerful. I'm not a huge beer drinker, and I used a light, lager-style beer in my recipe, but you can use any kind of beer you have on hand—or even seltzer instead of beer.

You can also customize the recipe, using part whole-wheat flour for more fiber or swapping out the butter for vegetable oil to make it vegan (see the King Arthur recipe for details). Paired with a smear of honey butter, the beer bread was the perfect dinner side dish.

See our No-Yeast Bread Recipes and No-Knead Bread Recipes for more baking ideas.