A Tale of Three Soda Breads
I’m not Irish.
I’m not even a little bit Irish.
The closest I can claim to Irish heritage is a great-grandfather who was Scottish — and based on the name and stories about our family’s character, he was probably a Borderer, not a Highlander.
But is it *Irish* Soda Bread?
If you ask King Arthur Baking about it, “Irish Soda Bread” as we know it in the United States has just about as much claim to being Irish as I have to being Scottish — which doesn’t mean it’s not a tasty, enjoyable quick bread that Americans associate with St. Patrick’s Day. I’ve made King Arthur’s recipe before; it attempts to split the difference between the USA version (I can’t make any claims as to Canadians’ preferences for either Soda Bread or St. Patrick’s Day!) and the traditional version.
In our mixed (non-Observant Jewish and secular Christian) household, we “celebrate” St. Patrick’s Day (also known as “[Integer (Pi*100)+3]/100 Day” — yes, we’re math geeks!) by purchasing cook-at-home corned beef at the cheapest price it will be at all year, eating non-Kosher but “traditional style” corned-beef-on-rye sandwiches, and sometimes indulging in the sweet, cake-like concoction marketed as “Irish Soda Bread” with the appropriate Americanized Irish names and green shamrocks on the label.
Settling on a Recipe… or Three
Since I’ve been baking most of the bread we’ve had these past two months, I would be making “Irish Soda Bread” at home. But which recipe to use? The American style, the crossover style, or could I possibly find a recipe for the “OG”, real Irish Soda Bread online? In “the history of Jewish compromises” (per then-MIT Hillel rabbi Dan Shevitz), why not all three? If I ended up with too much, I could always bring in some of the extra to work…
The three recipes I chose were (1) the King Arthur crossover recipe (which I’d made before and we all liked), (2) a fully American-style recipe from Martha Stewart, and (3) the closest recipe to the OG I could find, which is from LeAnne Shor at Lion’s Bread, which uses all-purpose (white) flour, with the intention of replacing as much of the flour as I could with King Arthur’s Irish-Style Flour (I didn’t have enough for the entire recipe), and the rest of it with Bob’s Red Mill Stone-Ground Whole Wheat Flour. Although stone-ground, my current bag of Bob’s Red Mill flour is closer to the commercial steel mill grind than to the much coarser grind I remembered from the last time I purchased stone-ground whole wheat flour. (I may have to find some Graham flour to more closely examine the milling differences.)
My plan was to bake rye bread on Friday and the soda breads on Saturday. Unfortunately, my rye sponge overproofed and I wasn’t able to recover it properly, so I had a very dense, flat, chewy bread (still edible, but not sandwich material) and needed to bake another rye bread as well. Because I would need the baking stone for Saturday’s rye bread, I needed to keep it in the oven and use it for baking the soda breads (none of whose recipes required a baking stone or steam).
Each of the bread recipes required a different baking temperature. To minimize stress on the baking stone, I organized my baking in order from lowest to highest temperatures. I started by preheating the oven to 350F, the lowest temperature required, finished making the rye dough and set it to bulk proof, and then worked on the Martha Stewart loaf.
Martha Stewart “Easy Irish Soda Bread”
Sadly, Martha Stewart’s recipe left something to be desired. I’m not sure if it was the melted butter, too much buttermilk, or something else. Following it exactly, I ended up with a batter rather than a shapeable dough. I added more flour, and more flour, and more flour… I finally ended up with about twice as much flour as the recipe called for — and to make sure I got some rise, I added in an extra ½ teaspoon of baking soda with the last addition of flour. I was afraid I might have overmixed the dough, but it rose nicely (with perhaps not as much oven spring as I would have expected).
I did have one additional issue: having placed my usual baking sheet over the baking stone, the bottom of the loaf appeared to brown faster than the top and sides, and I had concerns that it was burnt. I tried to minimize this on the other loaves by moving from my single-layer baking sheet to an air-layer baking sheet, increasing the time it would take for the bottom of the bread to crust.
While this bread was baking, I put together (separately) the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients for my next recipe. After removing this loaf from the oven, I raised the temperature to 400F for the King Arthur soda bread.
King Arthur Baking “Irish Soda Bread”
My second loaf used the King Arthur recipe. I used a pastry blender to cut the butter into the dry ingredients, but I forgot to add in the raisins afterwards. Once the Martha Stewart loaf was out of the oven, I added in my wet ingredients to the dry ones and prepared the loaf while my oven came up to heat.
The dough ended up a bit sticker than I remembered from my previous time with the recipe, but since the instructions say to bake it in a greased cake pan, I figured the recipe was designed to spread as it rose. Without the raisins, the bread didn’t rise nearly as much as I expected, and it crumbles a lot more easily than I should like.
While this loaf was baking, I sifted together the dry ingredients for the last, most traditional, soda bread (the only wet ingredient is buttermilk).
When the King Arthur loaf came out of the oven, I raised the temperature to 450F for the traditional soda bread.
Lion’s Bread “Traditional Irish Soda Bread”
King Arthur Baking’s paragraph on Irish Soda Bread starts:
The “real” Irish soda bread consists simply of Irish wholemeal flour (equivalent to a coarse grind of our American whole wheat flour), baking soda, salt and buttermilk.
The closest recipe to this I could find was on LeAnne Stor’s baking blog, Lion’s Bread. Unlike that “real” recipe, LeAnne uses all-purpose flour for her soda bread. It might be because her recipe was “developed in partnership with Kerrygold USA” and there are parts of the US in which anything other than bleached, all-purpose flour is difficult to find. As I mentioned earlier, I partially reverse-engineered the recipe by replacing the all-purpose flour with a combination of Irish-Style and stone-ground whole-wheat flours. This led to a very dry dough that needed another ¼ cup milk to make manageable. (This is not a failure of LeAnne’s recipe, but the difference in how whole wheat and white flours absorb fluid.)
This recipe calls for the oven temperature to be lowered to 400F after the first third of the baking time, at the same time the baker needs to rotate the loaf.
While this was the smallest of the loaves, it had a lot of oven spring and a nice, open crumb. It tastes a lot like a good bread-and-butter loaf.
Comin’ Through (with) the Rye
Before I added the buttermilk to my whole-grain soda bread ingredients, I deflated and preshaped the rye bread, intending to shape it and give it its second rise while the last of the “Irish” soda breads was in the oven.
Based on the way my rye dough handled, it was a bit overproofed, though not nearly as badly as Friday’s sponge had been. I was able to shape the loaf, even though it flattened out more than I would have liked. It baked properly, even though I forgot to lower the heat after removing the cover after the first ten minutes.
A Baking Stone Grace Note
The rye bread came out of the oven just before dinner time. I now had the requisite Jewish rye bread for corned beef sandwiches and the requisite soda breads… and I had a nice, hot baking stone for putting together a couple of quick pizzas from store-bought wrap breads I had in the fridge. (Hint: this is a really quick “thin crust” style pizza. The topping-covered parts of the crust are somewhat limp when baked on a regular cookie sheet, but nicely crisp when baked on a baking stone.)
Wrap Bread Pizza
Ingredients:
1 6-oz can tomato paste (makes 3–6 12” wrap pizzas, depending on how much sauce you like)
Thin flour wrap breads or tortillas
Pizza spices (garlic powder, black pepper, oregano, basil, crushed red pepper)
Shredded or grated pizza cheeses (mozzarella, provolone, parmesan)
Instructions:
1. If you are starting from a cold oven without a baking stone, preheat it to as high a temperature as it will go. If you are starting from a hot oven with a baking stone, you can either raise the temperature or leave it as it is.
2. Spread tomato paste over the wrap bread. If you leave a border (crown), it will get dry and cracker-like.
3. Dust the sauced area lightly with garlic powder, sprinkle with pizza spices to taste
4. Add the cheese on top
5. Bake at the highest temperature your oven will support, for about 5 minutes or until the cheese melts.
6. If you have a large (10”-12” wrap), use a pizza wheel to cut the wrap in four slices. Serve hot.