Low-Carb Cheesy Beer Bread Recipe

Holle loves to cook. She creates a lot of delicious recipes and enjoys sharing them.

Cheesy Beer Bread Recipe

You can use any type of cheese in this recipe for low-carb bread. I prefer a mix of cheddar and Colby Jack. You can also use any type of beer, but for fewer grams of total carbs, you might want to use a low-carb beer.

This cheesy beer bread is great with coffee, and I often have it for breakfast. I also use it for low-carb sandwiches with meat and sliced tomatoes. If you’re going to use the bread for sandwiches, I suggest you make the bread about 1/2-inch thick and reduce cooking time to 25 minutes.

Cook Time

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups flaxseed meal
• 1/2 cup soy flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 cup beer
• 1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon cooking oil
• 1/4 cup Splenda
• 1 teaspoon garlic salt
• 1 teaspoon dried basil
• 5 eggs, beaten
• 1 1/2 cups grated cheese

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. In a large bowl, combine flaxseed meal, soy flour, baking powder, and baking soda.
3. Slowly stir in beer and 1/3 cup of oil.
4. Add garlic salt and basil.
5. Slowly add eggs and stir in cheese.
6. Line a baking sheet with foil. Rub foil with 1 tablespoon oil. Spread batter on foil to about 3/4-inch thickness.
7. Bake for 35 minutes. When cool, cut into squares.

My Low-Carb Recipes

The mainstay of my day-to-day diet is low-carb food, from which I create lots of low-carb recipes. When I first began with low-carb dieting, my biggest challenge was giving up bread. It wasn’t hard for me to give up sweets. Anyway, even on low-carb diets, you can have sugar-free Jell-o, sugar-free pudding, sugar-free cheesecake, and other low-carb desserts. I’m not even having too much difficulty cutting potatoes and rice from my diet, but bread is a different story.

The Quest for Bread

I love bread in just about any form: toast, muffins, biscuits, sandwiches, etc. Of course, I just had to find some low-carb bread! A diabetic friend of mine had been on the quest for bread that matched this description before I began my diet. She found a few loaves you could order online and told me it was the best she’d been able to find. I decided against it, however, when I discovered the price. With shipping, the bread was around $10 a loaf!

There was no way I was going to pay that much just to have toast and sandwiches. I set out to learn to make my own low-carb bread, and I’m sharing that with you here.

What Is Low-Carb Food?

What’s low-carb food? Obviously, this particular subset of food includes items that contain few or no grams of carbohydrates. Eating too many simple carbs is unhealthy because the carbohydrates are easily converted to sugar in the body, elevating your blood glucose level. When that spikes, you might feel good for a little while, but the spike is always followed by a crash, which makes you feel pretty lousy.

What Are Some Examples?

Proteins and fats don’t elevate your blood sugar, and they help you stay less hungry for longer periods of time. Complex carbs are also healthier than simple carbs because you don’t get the roller-coaster effect from them that you get from simple carbs.

Examples of low-carb foods include:

• meats,
• poultry,
• fish,
• mayonnaise,
• mustard,
• butter,
• oil, and
• non-starchy vegetables.

Whole grains and other high-fiber foods are also lower in carbs due to their grams of fiber. The body can’t digest fiber, so those calories and carbs are passed through the body without calories. Nuts, for example, are high in fiber and can be considered a low-carb food.

How Did You Make This Bread Low-Carb?

Since most breads are made from wheat flour, it’s sometimes hard to imagine low-carb bread. It really does exist, however. Low-carb breads aren’t going to be as light and fluffy as white wheat bread, but they’re much healthier—and, in some cases, the low-carb bread can have a lot more taste than its bland cousin. Low-carb bread often has more substance to it, so it’s also more filling.

The main ingredient of my breads is flaxseed meal. Sometimes I also add soy flour, which improves the texture of the flax version. I also add Splenda, even when I’m making savory bread. Why? I do so because to me, flaxseed meal can have a slightly bitter taste. Using Splenda in the bread recipe helps to neutralize the bitterness.

What Is Flax Seed?

Flax seed has been touted for the past few years because of its health benefits, but do you really know: What is flax seed? Flax is an ancient plant that was used by humans more than 7,000 years ago. It was probably the first plant that humans learned to domesticate. Its fibers were made into fabric for clothing. Flax fibers are still used to make linen.

Flax seed is also used by mankind. The seeds are encased in the plants’ fruits, and they closely resemble apple seeds. Flaxseed is often used in cattle feed, and the oil is used to produce linseed oil, a common ingredient found in varnishes and paint. According to the Mayo Clinic, humans get more health benefits from ground flaxseed than they do from whole flax seed.

What Is Flaxseed Meal?

Flaxseed meal is a coarse flour-like ingredient made from ground flax seeds. It’s carbohydrate neutral. In other words, a two tablespoon serving of flaxseed meal contains four grams of carbs, but it also contains four grams of fiber. A single serving also packs 2,600 milligrams of healthy Omega-3 fats. Flaxseed meal contains no cholesterol, no trans fats, no salt, no sugar, and no gluten.

You can add it to cold cereals, fruit smoothies, casseroles, yogurt, oatmeal, and pancake batter. Of course, you can also use it for making low-carb bread.

What Are the Benefits of Flax Oil?

I’m sure you’ve heard of flax oil. In fact, you might even take flax oil supplements, as I do. Flax oil is produced by pressing flaxseed. The oil contains Omega-3 and Omega-6 fats, and it’s important to get a good balance of both types of fatty acids. For most of us, the problem is that we don’t get enough Omega-3s, and flax oil can help with that.

Flax oil has been studied extensively. There’s evidence that it can help reduce LDL cholesterol—the bad stuff that can accumulate on arteries. It might also be able to help raise HDL cholesterol—the good kind—and lower blood pressure. There’s evidence that flax oil helps to inhibit inflammation in the body, and some patients state that the oil helps relieve pain from arthritis and gout. Some studies even suggest that flax oil might play a role in protecting humans from certain types of cancer—especially breast cancer.

More About Beer Bread

Have you ever eaten beer bread? Beer can be added to many bread recipes, including yeast breads and quick breads. I often use beer in breads, including cornbread. My hushpuppies just wouldn’t be the same without adding some suds. I guess the yeast in the beer is what helps make the fried cornbread so light and fluffy.

Beer bread has a wonderful yeasty flavor. It’s usually moist, too, but if you don’t use some type of leavening in beer bread, the resulting loaf can be heavy and dense. With the beer bread recipe I’m sharing here, I use baking powder and baking soda to take care of the leavening. Beer bread goes great with lots of dishes, but we especially like it with homemade chili.

You can add other flavoring ingredients to your beer bread recipe, including cayenne, dill, chives, garlic, sundried tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, chopped onion, or sweet bell peppers. In this beer bread recipe, I use grated cheese, garlic, onion, and basil to create a savory low-carb bread.

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Comments

Beer Goggles Reviews on November 23, 2012:

I have diabetes and often need to use up excess beer from my reviews. I will look into these ingredients to see if they'll work for me but it sounds like my old bread maker is gonna have the dust brushed from it and is gonna see some action again.

Rest assured I won't be using Bud Light though.

Cheers!!

Carolee Samuda from Jamaica on May 04, 2012:

Habee, this one is different and I know I would love it but the man he ain't gonna eat that. He hates healthy food. I would have to trick him somehow. What I have been doing is slowly increasing the better ingredients like adding a little more whole wheat and reducing plain flour to stuff so as to gradually break him in.

breakfastpop on May 04, 2012:

This recipe interests me. I love bread, but often feel too guilty to eat it!

Bill Holland from Olympia, WA on May 04, 2012:

Well, I can't do the beer thing but the rest of it looked great! Sharing with my wife!

Holle Abee (author) from Georgia on May 04, 2012:

I'm sure you can figure out something! lol

mts1098 on May 04, 2012:

I am a bread guy and would love to try this recipe. My question is what do you do with the excess beer :)