St. Patrick’s Day is next week and I am here for it with this Irish Brown Soda Bread. Come with me!
I love food holidays and I love Ireland and I love Irish food and so I’m celebrating all of it for the next week. Pass the fish and chips and smoked salmon (even better when in a chowder!).
I’ve been in a food and post-vacation funk, but nothing like the spirit of the Irish to get me dancing a jig in the kitchen. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again- Irish food is fantastic, when prepared properly. It’s all about using the best ingredients that nature and the green rolling hills can provide and cooking them up in a way that helps them shine. I love a good pub, and good pub food (note the aforemention of fish and chips), but really fall in love with Ireland and its food the way that I have is to get out into the country and meet the good people and eat their food. I promise you’ll fall in love, too.
Now, I’ve tackled some of Ireland’s breads before. I’ve got a good, standard, up for anything brown bread, and last year I intro’d a subtly sweet soda bread. I’ve combined the two into this brown soda bread and it, coincidentally, tastes like what I was trying to do with the original brown bread recipe I made ages (like, literally ages) ago. Here’s the gist.
Back in 2012, Tomato and I biked through County Kerry in the southwest, and I fell in all kinds of lust with the brown bread from The Blue Haven B&B in Kinsale. When Mom and I went back a few years ago and I went to order the brown bread, it turns out that I was wrong and they were brown scones. Whatever they were called, they were exactly as I remember, and I’m so happy that these do a pretty good job of coming close.
The recipe here is adapted from one in Homemade Winter. The thing about this book is that when I look through it every once in a while, I never seems to strike the chord of, “oh yeah, I love everything in here and want to make it all now” in the way that some of my cookbooks do. However, whenever I’m looking for something and am not quite sure what, I’ll open this book and seem to find just that. I know it’s weird and that makes no sense at all, but there it is. It’s a solid book with solid recipes and this is one.
A few tweaks made it my own, including the use of trusty All Bran cereal in place of the wheat bran, and white whole wheat flour just because I happened to have it on hand. Since I was making this for me, and fresh bread is really the best, I cut her recipe in half, meanign that this makes just a perfect 6″ round mini-loaf, perfectly sized for lunch or dinner, aside a bowl of soup and, of course, salted Irish butter. Get the best, because this bread certainly deserves it.
Irish Brown Soda Bread
Irish Brown Soda Bread combines the best of Irish Soda Bread and traditional brown bread, with hearty oats, bran and flax to make it filling and nutritious.
Ingredients
- 2 cups (250g) white whole wheat flour
- 1 1/4 cups (100g) old-fashioned rolled oats
- 1/2 cup plus 1/3 cup (50g) All-Bran or other bran cereal
- 1/4 cup ground flax seed
- 2 TB, heaping, brown sugar
- pinch salt
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1 cup buttermilk
- 1 egg
Directions
- Step 1 Preheat the oven to 350F. Grease a 6″ cake pan and set aside.
- Step 2 In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients. Add the buttermilk and egg, and mix with a wooden spoon until it all comes together in a ball. Don’t overmix the dough, or the bread will be tough!
- Step 3 Brush the top of your load with a big of water, and if desired, with a little more oats. Slash a cross in the top of the loaf. Bake for 45 minutes. Remove the bread from the pan and place directly on the oven rack and bake an additional 10 minutes (so that the crust gets crusty!). Let cool on a cooling rack.
- Step 4 Store wrapped tightly in plastic wrap.
