Beer Bread with cheddar and jalapenos

This was accumulation of ideas. I had made beer bread a few times already (regular bread recipe with beer in place of water) and a friend of mine suggested adding cheese and jalapenos to it, this sounded like a fantastic idea to me.

Then I started an experiment with sourdough. The idea of letting dough sour before baking with it seemed a little counter intuitive to me but I wanted to give it a go. However to appease the part of me that was a little squeamish about letting my food sour before eating it I decided I would make a beer sourdough starter instead of a normal one with just water.

And so all these ideas came together into one loaf of bread last night (or rather into six bread bowls, also a running experiment).

Changes to the basic recipe:
-added a few generous handfuls of shredded sharp Wisconsin cheddar cheese to the flour and salt
-used a bottle of warm Fat Tire in place of the water (any beer will do, Fat Tire has been my favorite to use so far though).
-added 1 cup of my beer sourdough starter
-once everything else was mixed together but before I started seriously kneading the dough I added in a jar of sliced, pickled, jalapenos (drained). Probably about 1.5 cups.

As always, adding in new ingredients meant shifting the total amount of flour and liquid. I use a 1/4 cup measuring cup to add in more flour as needed and in this case I ended up pouring a few splashes from the bottle of beer I was drinking from while making it.

Just before baking the bread bowls I brushed on olive oil and sprinkled a generous amount of the cheese on top. Because of the shape of my oven I had to bake them 3 to a pan, one on top of the other so after about 20 minutes I quickly switched the pans around to help them bake more evenly and then let them bake for another 15-20 minutes.

They turned at amazingly delicious and incredibly spicy.