How to make soda bread

You know those days when you really feel like a loaf of freshly-baked bread, still warm from the oven, but you don’t want to have to mission to your nearest bakery or (even worse) wait for the bread to rise?

I have the answer! Not only do I have the answer, I have the answer that is healthy and good for you (well, as good for you as bread can be) and only has six ingredients! Woohoo! And (wait for it) one of those six ingredients is sour milk.

So let’s recap: You’re at home, you feel like delicious home-baked bread, and you have some sour milk taking up space in your fridge. Within an hour, you can transform those thoroughly undesirable circumstances into a loaf of soda bread. True story.

This recipe comes directly from my Irish grandmother, so it’s the real deal (soda bread is traditionally Irish) although I sometimes make a few tweaks… Here it goes.

Mix together:
1 cup flour,
1 cup nutty wheat (or wholewheat flour, or digestive bran, depending how nutty you want it to be),
1/2 heaped teaspoon bicarb of soda,
1/2 teaspoon salt and
3/4 teaspoon brown sugar.

Then add 1 cup buttermilk / plain yoghurt / sour milk and mix with your hands (deliciously squidgy!) until it forms a dough.

Turn the dough onto a baking tray in whatever shape you like (oval is the most common) and wet the top with water. You can cut a cross into it if you like, and if you want to get fancy you can sprinkle sesame seeds or poppyseeds on top.

Bake at 180°C for 45 mins to 1 hour, and eat warm with lashings of butter and mature cheddar.

My dad always says that it’s better the next day, but I think that’s just what his mom told him so that the whole loaf wasn’t eaten before it cooled. This recipe doubles up to make a larger loaf (i.e. to feed more than 2-3 hungry people).

Deeeeelicious. Download print-friendly recipe.