Loaf 32 – Irish Soda Breads

Posted on Mar 17, 2012 in loaves

My Irish bride requested Irish Soda Bread for St. Patrick’s day. She had a recipe on a 3×5 card from an old family member, but isn’t sure exactly who – so we decided that it must be the traditional family recipe.

Before making it I did some research online about soda breads and learned that the baking soda replaces yeast as the leavening agent, and that a “real” traditional Irish soda bread is only flour, baking soda, salt and buttermilk. If you’re interested in reading all about it, including a pretty long rant about how any other additions (like raisins, sugar, baking powder, etc.) don’t qualify it any longer as “traditional,” have a fun read at sodabread.info.

Sarah’s family recipe has sugar, baking powder, and, of all things, All Bran in it. We decided to do a side by side taste test of her recipe and the traditional recipe from the website. I followed both exactly per the directions.

The results were extremely different. The traditional soda bread was very bland, making it very clear why people have added all sorts of flavorful and sweet ingredients to it over the years. Sarah’s family recipe had a much better flavor – reminiscent of a bran muffin, but much denser.

We weren’t terribly impressed with these – and even if my technique was a little off I’m pretty sure getting it right wouldn’t be a huge improvement. We’d much rather have a yeast leaven bread, or in the case of Sarah’s family recipe, we’d rather have real bran muffins.

A fun experiment for St. Pat’s day, but I won’t be returning to this in the next 68 loaves.