Irish Soda Bread

My friend is throwing one of his annual St. Paddy’s Day themed potluck get together, just that it’ll be late this year. It’s an excuse to cook, eat, and get together. Originally I was just going to make a banana cream pie and color it green with food coloring but got to thinking and remembered irish soda bread. Since I haven’t really tried this type of bread before or even know what authentic irish soda bread tastes like, I categorized this under American instead of Irish for type of food. I think authentic irish soda bread has no sugar in it. To make sure I don’t create a complete flop on Saturday, I test-baked a loaf today. Here’s the recipe based off of Brother Rick Curry’s recipe from foodtv.com. I halved it and tweaked it a bit. Its only dad and me so we don’t exactly need two loaves of bread.

2 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 stick or 1/8 lb of unsalted butter
1 cup golden raisins soaked in lukewarm water
1 1/4 cups buttermilk
1 egg

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Fill a bowl with lukewarm water and soak the raisins.

In a mixing bowl, sift the flour, add the sugar, baking power, salt, and baking soda. Stir to mix the dry ingredients. Drop the butter into the flour and using your hands, pinch and crumble the butter into the flour until the butter and flour resembles a coarse crumbly texture. I found it easier to create crumbles when the butter was not straight from the fridge. It was a little between room temperature and fridge temperature. You want the butter a little cold so you can still create crumbles. After you have incorporated the butter into the dry mixture, create a well in the middle of the bowl to put your wet ingredients. Drain the water from the raisins. You don’t want the water, you want the now plumper raisins. Check the raisins to make sure there isn’t any sort of extras. I found a little grape leaf or two in mines…

Crack the egg into the well, add the buttermilk, and add the raisins. Use a spoon or rubber spatula and stir the ingredients until it is well mixed. Make sure you break the yolk and get it in there.

Your dough will resemble a super thick pancake batter. Both are quickbreads after all. I stirred mines for a few extra minutes to work up the gluten in the flour.

The original recipe calls for a 9″x13″ bread loaf pan. Unfortunately that’s not a pan that I own. My original idea was to put the dough onto my jellyroll baking pan and make a round dome loaf. I didn’t realize the dough would be the consistency of pancake batter and not a solid piece of dough. So the closest pan I had was an 8″ round Wilton Springform pan. I threw the measuring spoons in to give you an idea of how big the pan really is. Spray the pan with a cooking spray. Mines was buttered flavor. If you don’t have a butter flavored cooking spray, grease the pan down with butter.

Scoop the dough/batter into the pan and try to spread it as evenly as possible. Pop the bread into the oven on the center rack and walk away for about an hour. You may want to stick around the vicinity of the kitchen though, the baking bread smell wafting out of the kitchen is very nice.

After about an hour, you should get something like this. Stick a toothpick into the center, if it comes back out clean, its done. If you see some crumbles, pop it in for another 15 minutes. I baked for a total of 1 hr 15 minutes.

After about five to ten minutes, take the bread out of the pan and allow it to cool. Careful, its still pretty hot right now, wear some oven mitts. You should really allow it to cool somewhat before you slice into it. I couldn’t wait… here’s what the final bread looks like:

The bread is a little sweet so I wanted to put a little butter on top. Its great warm and nicely moist. Traditional irish soda bread has caraway seeds in the bread but I opted not to put that in since that’s not a spice I normally stock in my pantry at home. This is definitely something I’m going to make again for the party this Saturday though I may try it in a bread pan some other time so I get more height on the bread.