About this bread
Irish soda bread is most often found as dense, sweet loaf sold in grocery stores around March to correspond with St. Patrick’s Day. It’s sprinkled with coarse sugar and raisins. I was in my fifties when I tried it for the first time, and found it to be pleasant but blah. If you’re interested in its history, you can read about it here. But here’s the spoiler: despite its name, American Indians invented it and the Irish got all the credit.
Paul Hollywood has gone rogue with this bread, and despite its name, he uses baking POWDER. In 100 Great Breads, the fact that the recipe didn’t contain baking soda had me worried. Was it a typo? But since I had some buttermilk I wanted to use up, I decided to skip over breads #3 through #7 and go straight to #8. I followed his directions and used the ingredient exactly as his recipe instructed, and it was the best Irish soda bread I’ve ever had. Irish soda bread takes about about one hour from start to finish, and taste even better the next day when toasted.
My screw up
I followed the recipe exactly, except I used my Kitchen Aid mixer (I LOVE this thing) to mix the ingredients. The butter had to be worked into the flour by hand. The dough hook just tossed the chunks of butter around without incorporating them. After dumping in the remaining ingredients and mixing, the dough was slightly sticky, but easy to form into two round loaves,
I used my lame (that’s the name of the razor blade thing used to slash dough) to cut crosses. Cutting a cross was believed to keep the devil out in the 19th century.
Instead of a deep cross, I simply made a couple of slashes on the top. You can see from my photos that the bread ripped. I think this also gave it a bit more of a doughy texture which required longer baking. Recommendation: Use an actual knife to make deep cuts on your loaves. Then your bread won’t rip apart like mine did.
The cross should have looked like this:
The taste
I’ve made soda bread before and it tasted pretty much like the stuff you buy in the store, minus the raisins and sugar sprinkles. This recipe from Jo’s Larder makes a nice loaf using yogurt. But this recipe from Paul Hollywood was AMAZING! It tasted a lot like a huge southern biscuit you’d get in a traditional southern diner, the type they serve with sausage gravy. I had to leave the house because I couldn’t stop eating it. I am going to make this for breakfast on Christmas morning along with bacon and eggs. So good!
But next time I’ll make deeper slashes.
