Irish Soda Bread

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Irish Soda Bread

Written by Ruth Ruane

My Mother taught me how to make soda bread. When I became a baker I did things a little differently. But the basic idea is still the same.

AH! Soda bread, it's more about the technique than the ingredients really.
The best tip is make it as fast as you can, take no more time over it that you would say making a cup of tea.

Have the oven already hot, 220ºC. This is very important for soda bread because as soon as you add the liquid to the flour with the raising agents added then the chemical reaction will start happening. If it is left sitting waiting to go into the oven it will rise some and then fall flat.
So there are two stages:
Mix the dry ingredients
Add the wet ingredients
You can mix the dry ingredients together ahead of time in a large quantity if you like and then as you want to make quick bread just throw some dry mix into a bowl and add enough milk/yogurt/goatsmilk/buttermilk or half milk half water to make a sticky dough.
Mix lightly with your hand and plop it into a greased baking tin.
Hot oven!

The dry mix proportions:

Use baking powder and for every 100g of flour use a level tsp of baking powder. Always add a pinch of good sea salt.
You can use half brown half white flour.
The best brown to use is the coarse ground brown rather than the fine ground flour that is used for yeast bread.
Use plain white flour for white soda bread and add a little sugar to sweeten, just a handful.

You can use just the basic flour, raising agent and liquid, but I like to add a dessert spoon of butter, an egg or some raisins or even cheese or apples before adding the the liquid.
If you make the dough a little stiffer by adding less liquid you can place the dough on a floured surface and roll it out to 2 inch thick and use a cup to cut out scones.
These only take 15 minutes in the oven, brush with an egg to make them shiny on top. The less you handle the dough the lighter they will be.

You can also roll out the dough a little thinner and spread with butter and grated cheese, roll it up like a swiss roll and cut into 1 and a half inch thick slices, place the slices flat on the greased tray and give them 15 minutes in the oven, yummy, cheese rolls. Now you got me going, I feel like making cheese rolls.
The great thing about soda bread and scones is that you can have hot ready to eat scones on the table in 30 minutes if you work quickly: and remember the quicker you make them the nicer they will be!

You can make your own baking powder: 100g of bread soda (bicarbonate of soda) to 50g of bextarter. Making your own is cheaper and you can make some up and store it in tub. Label.

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