Ina Garten-Inspired Irish Soda Bread

Compiled by Igor Kukolj, Editor. Nobody here has cooked this — how these are made.

There is no yeast in this and no proving, which people take to mean there is no hurry. The opposite is true.

Bicarbonate of soda reacts with the acid in buttermilk on contact, and it produces all the carbon dioxide it is ever going to produce within a few minutes. A dough left sitting on the counter while the oven heats has already spent most of its rise into the air of your kitchen. It goes in flat and comes out flat.

Heat the oven first. Mix, shape and load in under five minutes. This is the one bread where working fast matters more than working carefully.

Handle it as little as you can bear

Soda bread has no gluten structure to develop and no time to relax one. Knead it and you get a tough, tight loaf. Bring it together with a light hand — ten or twelve turns, until it just holds — and accept a rough, shaggy surface. That is what it should look like.

The cross is not decoration

Cut it deep, a good two centimetres into a round this dense. It opens the middle of the loaf so heat can reach the centre before the crust hardens and seals. Cut shallow, or skip it, and you get a loaf with a raw seam through the middle — the most common way this bread fails.

Why buttermilk and not milk

The acid is the whole mechanism. Bicarbonate of soda needs something acidic to react with, and plain milk gives it nothing — you get a dense loaf with a faint soapy taste from the untriggered soda. If you have no buttermilk, stir a tablespoon of lemon juice into 400 ml of milk and leave it ten minutes.

Storing

It is at its best within hours and stale by the next day — this is a bread with no fat or yeast to preserve it, and that is normal. Day two, toast it. It freezes well sliced, for a month.