March 15, 2016

Irish Soda Bread

This is Ireland. Leprechauns and green beer, not so much
It's that time of year again. The time of year when people dress up in green, drink alcohol, and pretend like they've known the absolute terror of driving down the wrong side of the road, a road about as wide as just one horse and buggy, while a string of trucks come at you at some stupid number of kilometers per hour. Who knows with kilometers? The point is these trucks are coming at you fast. And you can't swerve out of the way, because some Irish maniac built walls on the sides of the roads. Where was I? Oh yeah, Ireland. I went to Ireland somewhat recently, as people who stalk me through obsessive reading of this blog to glean precious geographic details about my location may be aware. And while I was there, I managed to avoid touristy and inauthentic nonsense, or what we referred to as "shillelaghs and shamrocks," to a great degree. And in that spirit, instead of giving you a recipe for some green booze or nonsense like that, I'm making some traditional Irish Soda Bread. And when I say "traditional," I mean "there are websites dedicated to preserving the heritage of this stuff." Irish people, or at least the ones who make crazy websites, take this stuff seriously. So this St. Patrick's day, when you're drunkenly pretending you're Irish to try and impress somebody in a bar, whip out a loaf of this authentic Irish fare. I'm sure they won't think you're creepy for carrying food around in your pockets.

Ingredients:

4 Cups All Purpose Flour
1.75 Cups Buttermilk
1 tsp Baking Soda
1 tsp Salt

Yeah, there's not much in the ingredients department. Way-too-intense Irish website builders are pretty firm on the concept that true Soda Bread only has flour, buttermilk, baking soda, and salt in it. I've lost track of how many times I read the phrase "if it has more than 4 ingredients, it's a tea cake." I don't know what a tea cake is, but that seems like a super broad statement. Are buttermilk pancakes with steak and eggs a tea cake? Apparently. Anyway, the point is, that if you were expecting sugar, raisins, currants, or any other nonsense, too bad. Your tea cakes aren't welcome here, and Erin's Isle apparently has a thing or two (or way more than two) to say about where you can stick your currants.

Extra special bonus points if you burned yourself on the oven
making muffins last week, and avoided doing it again.
The first thing you're gonna need to do is dump your flour, baking soda, and salt into a bowl. Whisk it around to mix everything together, and to aerate the flour. Add in your buttermilk, and stir by hand until it forms a dough. The longer you leave it and the more you knead it, the tougher your final product will be (because gluten), so you want to work quickly and work the dough as little as you can. Once you've freaked out several times about overworking the dough, but then gone back and worked it a little more anyway because of your crippling indecision, plop it onto a pan and form it into a disk. If you want to be super authentic, cut a cross into the top of the bread. This allows the dough to expand without forming cracks, and it allows the bread to be easily split into smaller bits. Also, if you imposing religious symbolism onto baked goods, well that's a happy bonus. Throw that mess into a 425 degree oven for 25 minutes, then turn the heat down to 350 and let it cook for another 20 minutes. And that's all there is to it. You can totally chop up some garlic and mash it with salt and butter to slather on this stuff. Or not. Either way, you've got some authentic Irish awesomeness to carry with you through the never-ending throngs of shillelaghs and shamrocks, like elvish lembas into the dark heart of Mordor. Bonus points if you trade a hunk of your bread for green alcohol to consume, thus ruining the value of having made something authentically Irish in the first place. Further bonus points if you throw a loaf at somebody's head from off of a parade float.

2 comments:

  1. Avi, you should warn your readers (I just warned your sister), that if you don't eat this bread within 48 hours, it rivals the Giant's Causeway in its rockhardnessimpossibletocheworswallowness. But of course, that gives you the excuse to scoff the lot immediately it comes out of the oven, to preserve its integrity ;-) Thanks for the post. Enjoyable as always.

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    Replies
    1. Good to note. Like I mentioned to you, I've heard a warm moist towel can solve that problem. Happy baking/eating!

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