Last summer I tried making bread for the first time, and was shocked by how well it turned out (I’d been scared of baking with yeast for forever). That kicked off a veritable bread-baking spree, where I tried all manner of artisan yeast breads. But for some reason I’ve only made soda bread once before now, a traditional Irish soda bread which I wanted to try after we went to Ireland and ate it there.
And yet, when I tried this recipe, it made me wonder why I ever bother with the finicky-ness and waiting of yeast breads.
This bread is totally easy and delicious. Now, to be fair, this isn’t authentic Irish soda bread, which only has four ingredients and definitely doesn’t have any sweeteners. But it still is soda bread, and there’s something special about it versus its yeast-based counterparts. Something about the chemistry of the ingredients (maybe the soda and buttermilk?) makes it moist and soft, much more resistant to drying out in the open air. Soda bread in its modern form became popular in the U.S. during colonial times because it was cheap, fast, and easy, and that’s still the case today.
That’s right—best of all? There’s no rising time for soda bread, so that means you can have hot, fresh bread within an hour or so of deciding you’re craving it.
So we’ve got an hour til you have fresh bread in your hot little hands. Start your engines… [Read more…]
finding time for cooking 