WFMW - Soda Bread

Soda Bread

We love soda bread around here. Its one of the easiest things to make and definitely the quickest way to have lovely fresh bread in the house. I'm trying this year to buy as little bread and baked goods as possible and so far apart from one or two sandwich loaves when I've been short on time I've managed it.

I've been using the same recipe for years and its been a great help in sticking to my resolution.

1lb plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
1oz butter
1/2 pint buttermilk


Feel free to half the recipe (I usually do), substitute margarine for the butter or sour milk for the buttermilk it all works. Bear in mind though if you use sour milk also add a pinch of cream of tartar to help keep the bread tender, although the bread is still fine without it, it just makes it a little lighter.

Method (haha)

Dump all dry ingredients into a bowl, rub in butter (don't be too fussy about this) add buttermilk and mix it all together with your hands. It will form a soft dough, but it shouldn't be too sticky.

Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and shape it into a fat disk about 5 centimetres thick.

You can cook the bread in a couple of ways either,

Place the disk whole onto a baking sheet and score into wedges and bake at 180C (350F) for 30 minutes, or

Cook in a heavy based frying pan or skillet over a low/med heat turning occasionally until dark brown blisters have formed on either side of the bread. You may want to make the disk a centimetre or so thinner to cook it this way.

Either way, allow to cool slightly, cut into wedges, split and cover with butter, jam, eggs, bacon, whatever takes your fancy. It keeps for a day or two and its much easier to toast after a couple of days.

Of course you can add to the bread. I don't personally know where the idea of adding caraway seeds came in and I've certainly never seen any for sale with them added, but a lot of people seem to like it, you could give it a whirl. A great addition is dried fruit, currants, raisins or sultanas are all good.

And you could always whisk a couple of tablespoons of treacle (molasses) into the buttermilk before adding to the flour to make treacle farls (the husband's personal favourite) or go the whole hog and add treacle, fruit and cinnamon for a lovely sweet tea bread.

If you try the bread, please let me know and feel free to pass on the recipe to anyone with a pen and paper.

For recipes, tips, crafts and more head over to Rocks in my Dryer.

1 comment:

  1. I AM going to make this.....as soon as I get my new oven - it is now ordered :)

    Thanks for sharing the recipe.

    ReplyDelete

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