Today I’m posting the recipe for Buttermilk Brown Soda Bread. With treacle, honey and oats. About as traditionally Irish a thing as you can eat. Simple, healthy, brimful of wholemeal, and delicious. Easy to make. Great to make with kids. Who will devour your wholemeal loaf and ask for more.
Best eaten warm from the oven with fat curls of golden butter, or slabs of salty blue cheese. Smoked salmon, pepper and lemon are traditional toppings too. Raspberry jam. Or thick cuts of home baked ham and mustard. My kids devour it in their lunch boxes. An easy way to get wholemeal goodness in their diet, and something they enjoy helping the bake
Recipe below. There’s some hints and tips after the recipe section about sourcing buttermilk. There’s also a little history about Irish Soda bread at the end.
Ingredients
1 litre of buttermilk
350g white flour (plain flour/all purpose flour, or strong flour, both work well)
550g wholemeal flour
Two handsome dollops of treacle
Two handsome dollops of honey
2 teaspoons of salt
4 teaspoons of sodium bicarbonate
A large mixing bowl.
Two loaf tins. Round or rectangular. Approximately 2lb tins.
Spatula.
Wire racks to cool. Or just pop it on top of your stovetop.
Children, to help mix the flour and bicarb, and generally festoon the counter, kitchen, cat, you and themselves with remarkable quantities of flour. Also. The only way to get the proper amount of butter on a warm slice of fresh baked brown soda bread is to get someone under 7 to do it. Butter and kidlike enthusiasm are an unbeatable mix.
Method.
Preheat your oven to 220 C (420 F)
If using metal tins, butter them. If using silicon tins, get the kids to wear them as chefs hats.
Pour a little buttermilk into a cup or jar. About 200ml. Add your treacle and honey to this. Let it stand for ten minutes, mixing every now and then, scraping the spoons off. Make sure they are well mixed. This means the treacle is evenly distributed in the bread.
Mix the dry ingredients together – the flour, salt, oats and bicarb. This is key to getting a good bread. If you mix the dough too much when it’s wet you get a heavy dense bread that’s tough. Soda bread is already dense. Overmixed when it’s wet and you’ll get a bread you would use to lob at castle defences in 1348. Mixing the dry ingredients together well means you avoid overmixing.
Make sure your oven is up to temperature. You want to have your dough in the oven quickly.
Mix your wet ingredients in. Mix until the dough comes together and there are no dry pockets of flour left. This shouldn’t take more than 90 seconds or so. Make sure to scrape flour up from the bottom of the bowl and mix it in, as some always sticks. If you are used to yeast or sourdough bread, the dough will look and feel alien and weird. You are looking for something that has the consistency of a thick cement you would use to lay breezeblocks with. It should be thick, craggy, and claggy. Like the kind of wet sucking clay you would plant spuds in in Northwest Ireland after three years of solid rain. This is not a bug. This is a feature.
Spoon the mix into your two tins. It will be rippled, craggy, and frankly weird looking. This is fine. This is soda bread.
Cook in the middle of your oven for 15 minutes at 220 c (420F), then turn your oven down to 180c (350 F) and cook for 35 minutes more. Slide out of the tins and leave to cool for 15 minutes of so. Devour. Or, if you thinks its not done, pop the bread out of its tins and put back on for 5-10 minutes.
Tips and tricks.
If you can’t buy buttermilk, or its expensive, there’s an easy hack. Take a litre of ordinary milk. Add two tablespoons of lemon juice, mix, and let it stand for 5 minutes. This’ll make the milk acidic enough to activate the bicarb. And you won’t lose any taste, texture, or nutrition. It will work, chemically, exactly the same way.
If you want a really crunchy crust on your bread, take it out of the tins and put it back on the middle shelf of the oven for five minutes. Leave to cool on wire racks. If you want a softer crust, take the bread out of the oven and leave it to cool wrapped in a teatowel.
History
Wholemeal bread. It’s associated with longer life, decreased obesity, lowered rates of obesity and cancer
The roots of this bread are in bastable bread. Bastable bread is a simple poor persons bread. As Irish a food as i can think of. It’s the bread you made if you couldn’t afford white bread, or if you didn’t have an oven. It used bicarb to rise, and you made it in a Dutch oven, a heavy, flat topped cast iron pot. Drop the bread in, pop the dutch oven in the embers of your open fire and shovel some coals onto the flat lid . It also meant you could make a risen bread with poor quality flour.
Bastable bread was a staple of poor Irish households in the 1800’s. All you needed was an open fire, or hearth, and one pot. Typically the pot had a handle, and would be hung over the fire, from a tripod on chains, or on a crane – a swinging metal arm built into the fireplace that let you hang pots over the embers. But in a pinch, you could put the pot straight onto the ashes, or bury in under an open fire outdoors, with a covering or earth and ash as an insulator.
Becasue of the poor quality, low gluten flour, the bread often had a cakelike consistency. If you use plain flour in the recipe, which is a low gluten flour, the crumb will be more cakelike.
It’s a hearty bread. Two thick slices of this with butter and cheese will fuel a half day of work.
You didn’t indicate how much oats to mix in!