recipe: traditional brown soda bread

that you can make in a range of sizes for optimal fun

What I’m reading: the first PRINT Vittles magazine that I pre-ordered a few months ago and received this week.

What I’m listening to: Soda Blonde’s new album - released a few days after I saw them live at The Garage, Highbury last week.

What I’m eating: a really excellent burger at Plimsoll (below). 10/10, will be eating again very soon.

Soda bread is something that most Irish people grew up eating, in one format or another. My mum makes brown bread regularly, and when I’m at home, we eat it for breakfast with butter and homemade marmalade. Mum’s brown bread is, technically, soda bread, in that it’s leavened with baking soda (or more specifically, the chemical interaction between an acidic and an alkaline compound - bicarbonate of soda (basic) and buttermilk (acidic)). However, when I hear “soda bread”, I think almost exclusively of a loaf akin to the one below: free form, with a deep cross cut into the top.

I wrote an article for Eaten magazine last year about baking soda, and when I baked a loaf to illustrate this kind of bread, I made a white soda bread. White soda bread (made with white flour, i.e., no bran or wheatgerm) is not dissimilar to a scone, particularly when baked with currants or raisins (in which case it is commonly called a spotted dog). Traditionally, you cut a cross into the top (presumably a religious reference), and then prick each of the four quadrants to “let the fairies out” - a reference to Irish pagan culture and mythology.

In Northern Ireland, this would be called “wheaten bread”, and I believe that it would usually be made with a bran-heavy type of grain - i.e. wholemeal flour or with the addition of wheatgerm or bran. The wholegrain flour combined with the buttermilk make these types of bread much more substantial, and perfect (in my opinion) for breakfast.

The recipe below is one I developed for the menu at the Fat Badger. We serve it with soup (currently nettle soup), and whipped butter. We make our own butter by whipping double cream until the fat separates from the buttermilk, and we reserve (and ferment slightly) the buttermilk, before using it to make the loaves every day. I like to serve a loaf to each table, so we have a few different size options, to serve 1-2, 3-4, 5-6 etc. I made this little table below to help ensure that we make the right amount of dough every day, and we scale the loaves at 150, 250 and 350g respectively.

I found it really difficult to source a wholemeal flour that was coarse enough for this kind of bread - so we had to improvise. We use lovely (but quite finely milled) wholemeal flour from Wildfarmed, which we supplement with wheatgerm and rolled oats to achieve that rough “brown bread” texture. I’ve added a decent amount of treacle, both for sweetness and colour.

So whether you call it brown bread, wheaten bread or soda bread - I really recommend that you bake a loaf and eat it with a generous amount of butter.

recipe: soda bread