Sometimes, late at night, I tend to say things like “should I make bread?” (Yes, the answer is always yes.)
The great thing about soda bread is you can go from “should I make bread?” to steaming hot bread in under 1 hour. It’s trivial.
Apparently soda bread also has glycemic properties similar to sourdough and whole wheat breads.
There are enough similar Irish soda bread recipes floating around and mine has drifted so much that I can’t find the random blog that inspired it, so I’m going to treat it as open source and share the whole thing.
Soda Bread
Ingredients
- 480g flour
- Either all AP flour, or 400g AP and 80g whole wheat
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 3.5 teaspoon baking powder
- 1.75 cups buttermilk
Steps
- Preheat oven to 425F.
- Add flour, salt, and baking powder into a bowl and combine throughly. Stir in milk and mix well. It will be a little sticky.
- Knead using a little flour and form into a relatively smooth log or ball.
- Place dough on parchment paper in dutch oven
- Score the top with a sharp knife
- Bake for approximately 45 minutes
- 30 minutes covered
- Remove lid, then cook another 15 minutes to brown the top
Let it sit for 10m before slicing.
You can butter in steaming hot, you can schmear it with blackberry jam, but, being a thick, enriched bread, it also makes for excellent french toast the next day.
I’m obviously using a different bread, swapped buttermilk for regular milk because I had it and it worked, and ditched the nutmeg because after a lot of tinkering decided it wasn’t doing much.
French Toast
Ingredients
- 2 large eggs
- 0.5 cup buttermilk
- The original used regular milk, but I didn’t have any and this worked really well… so now it’s a thing.
- Heavy dusting of cinnamon
- Splash of vanilla extract
- Knob of butter
- Two thick slices of soda bread
- Maple syrup.
- Get the real thing. It should have one ingredient that came out of a tree in Canada or Vermont.
Steps
- In a flat bottom dish (I have a square pyrex. You just need something flag that can fit the bread without too much extra space), whisk together eggs, cinnamon, and vanilla.
- Soak the bread in the egg mixture. 5 minutes on each side.
- Melt butter in a big nonstick pan.
- This is a 4 on my stove. The butter will start to foam as you cook the toast.
- Add bread to pan. Cook about 3 minutes on each side, but what you’re really looking for is browning. Go by color and smell, not time.
- Drizzle in maple syrup and serve steaming hot.
