Brown Soda Oatmeal Bread

Apr 5, 2013

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…

Carbs o’the Irish (Traditional Irish Soda Bread)

Sep 21, 2012

“A cabin with plenty of food is better than a hungry castle.” ~ Irish saying

Today we tackle that most basic, humble, and hearty of Irish foods—traditional Irish soda bread.

When I decided to try soda bread, I visited several sites to make sure I got a good, authentic recipe. What I learned along the way was that soda bread is inherently simple, literally just flour, salt, baking soda, and buttermilk or sour milk. If it has eggs, raisins, butter, sugar, shortening, or baking powder, it may be delicious but it isn’t Irish soda bread.

Soda bread didn’t actually originate in Ireland. But just as pizza now is thoroughly owned by the Italians, soda bread is as Irish as Guinness and colcannon. It became popular in the early and mid-1800s for a couple reasons, largely boiling down to the poverty conditions that existed and what the average person could most easily put on the table. Yeast was expensive, unpredictable, and time-consuming, but baking soda (or the various forms they used back then) could be procured easily (as could the sour milk to react with it) and produced fairly consistent results.

So the recipe I tried was very simple, and thus very easy. The benefit of soda bread is that there’s no rising time, so it pays off immediately. Stir together your ingredients, bake, and you’re eating hot, fresh bread within the hour. I didn’t eat it right away, but brought it into work the next morning and it made a great breakfast—topped with homemade jam, of course!