Irish Soda Bread: A Saint Patrick's Day Treat

My life situation has recently changed unexpectedly, and as a result, I've temporarily lost access to all my cookbooks.  Thus, I'm shifting away from my march through The Bread Baker's Apprentice for a while, and my bread journey is going to be more of a random walk for a while.

Chocolate chip soda bread.  Note the scoring on top to release the steam.  Also note that we were hungry and decide to cut into the finished loaf before I managed to get a picture!

For St. Patrick's Day last week, I decided to try something entirely new: soda bread.  Soda bread is very different from "normal" bread in that it uses a chemical leavening agent (baking soda) instead of yeast.  Thus, it's similar to cake in some respects, though the dough is denser and more chewy than is usually desirable for a cake.  Like most breads, soda bread can do well with a wide variety of fillings.  In my case, I decided to go for a dessert soda bread, so this one is filled with chocolate chips.

This was my first time making a soda bread, and one of only a handful of times I've ever eaten it.  The first time I ever tried it was during a massive snowstorm when I was a kid.  In predictable fashion, everyone went out and bought up the entire stock of staples from all the local grocery stores.  Unfortunately, due to their work schedules, my parents got to the stores after the zombie hoards had feasted, so they were able to buy neither bread nor yeast.  Thus, my siblings and I got to eat soda bread instead of the regular stuff for a day or two.

At the time, I remember thinking it was extremely weird.  And if you don't know what to expect, it absolutely is.  The texture is much softer than "normal" bread, and it's denser, to boot.  I may have had soda bread a handful of times since then, but none of them particularly stand out.  I've definitely never made it before.

All of that is just to say, I had pretty much no idea what I was doing when I jumped into last week's bake.  I dug up a recipe from the internet and just rolled with it.  I'm pretty sure I got something wrong, because the dough was much wetter than described by the recipe, so I wasn't able to knead it much, and the shaping went somewhat wrong.  My guess is that I either missed adding a half cup of flour (I don't think so) or that the recipe developer did not share my standard practice of trying not to compact flour when measuring by volume (possible).

In either case, I ended up with a dough that was pretty much impossible to shape properly.  Without a round baking pan or the ability to form the dough into a proper disk, I ended up pushing the dough into a rectangular cake pan.  It went okay, as you can see, but the process of forcibly spreading a wet dough into a buttered glass baking pan meant the bottom inevitably stuck.

Since I was just baking for myself and my family, a stuck bottom isn't the end of the world.  Obviously, there will be lots of room for improvement the next time I try a soda bread.  And there will be a next time because even with my beginner's mistakes, this was good bread.

Until next time, happy eating.

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A Year in Bread

Sunset from my new home in Denver

Far too long ago, I promised a COVID mega-post.  Life has been even more insane in the past six months than it was during the first 6 months of the pandemic.  That sounds odd, I know.  At least for the first six months, however, I had the same job and the same home.  Since my last full post, our dog got very sick, Jess and I moved to Denver, and I left my teaching job at CUNY.  All of these have been major disruptions, and life feels very different now than it did almost a year ago when my department chair told me at 3 PM that classes were going to be suspended starting at 6 PM and that we shouldn't come to campus until informed otherwise.  I've never been back.

Throughout all of this, I've continued to bake.  I love bread, and it's been one of my most important outlets during this difficult period of my life.  Thus, at long last, here is the COVID mega-post.

My year in bread

For Christmas in 2019, Jess bought me a bread-baking class at Le Pain Quotidien in lower Manhattan.  The class was scheduled for Saturday, 14 March, which was three days after my department chair told me not to come to campus the next day.  Everyone was really uncertain what was coming next, and the subway ride to the bakery was eerily quiet.  There were still lots of people around, and a few had masks, but no one knew yet whether they were effective.  It feels weird to admit that I didn't wear a mask.  In fact, everything was so uncertain that I actually called the instructor to make sure that class was still on that day.  It was.  That was my last day of "normal" activity before NYC seemed to completely come apart, and I remember almost everything I did that day.  One of those things was that I managed a good baguette for the first time, though I admit that I had serious professional supervision.

The finished focaccia

Once things calmed down enough that we felt safe having 1-2 people come visit us, I frequently tried out new bread recipes on our friends.  I made bagels repeatedly over the past year, including a fun Thanksgiving Day breakfast.  The bagels have been a pretty big hit, and I personally really enjoyed the cinnamon buns and the focaccia.  Jess absolutely raved about the pain a l' ancien, and I can't say that I disagree.  It was nutty and rich with a pretty amazing crunch.

We left New York at the beginning of August to drive to Denver.  By sheer happenstance, the last two recipes I made before we had to pack up the kitchen were Kaiser rolls and Marbled Rye, two New York staples.  The marbled rye recipe calls for a very dark ingredient to lend color and a bit of extra punch in the flavors.  I didn't have any of the preferred ingredients, so I had to substitute regular cocoa.  It's plain from the picture that the dark rye lost a lot of color during the baking, through it still tasted great!

Marbled Rye

Lavash crackers

One of the first recipes I attempted in Denver was Lavash crackers.  By strange coincidence, one of our Denver friends happens to love them, and she seemed reasonably pleased with the result.  I think the centers probably needed to crisp up a little more, but the edges were very clearly done and were in danger of catching by the time I pulled out the crackers.  More rolling next time!

For my birthday, Jess bought me a very nice bread box.  Up until then, we'd just been keeping bread in plastic bags on our counter.  (Pro-tip: NEVER store fresh bread in the fridge.  It goes stale much more quickly due to the low moisture environment.)  The picture shows my fancy new bread box, filled with three different bakes that I prepped around Thanksgiving.  I admit, I probably went a bit overboard, but Thanksgiving comes only once a year!

My new bread box
Clockwise from the top left: brioche rolls, whole wheat sourdough, everything bagels.

Eggplant sandwich

Around Christmas, I made two different recipes.  I had previously tried pane siciliano, but I got the shape wrong, and I wanted to try again.  Despite the poor swirl on the first shape, we both liked the flavor, and agreed that these baby loaves make great sandwich bread.  For Christmas Eve, we did roasted eggplant and browned mushroom sandwiches with parmesan cheese and a garlic mayo.  Yum!

For Christmas Day itself, I made my first attempt at panettone.  For those of you who know your Great British Bake Off, no, I didn't cool it upside down.  Paul Hollywood would probably hurt me, but I doubt he reads this, so I'm pretty sure I'll get away with it.  I have to admit, it wasn't my favorite bake ever.  It was tasty, but the booze-soaked fruit gave it a little more zing than I prefer.  I don't think it's going to become a Christmas tradition.  Maybe this year I'll try a stollen instead.

Just this past weekend, I prepped Vienna bread, shaped into baguettes.  It was supposed to be a different recipe, but I realized too late that we had used up our semolina flour making Roman gnocchi (also highly recommend, BTW), so I had to improvise.  The next recipe in the book that needed the biga I had already prepped was the Vienna bread, so that's what happened.  The Vienna bread is a lightly enriched dough, so it gives a really soft crumb, but you still get that nice crispy exterior.  The texture was, admittedly, fantastic, but the flavor wasn't anything to write home about.

Vienna bread baguettes

I decided that I prefer a lean dough for baguettes, and I think Jess probably feels the same.  If you look closely at the photo, you can see some fabric peeking into the top left corner.  One of our friends bought me a couche as a going away present when we left New York.  It was a great gift, and it's made it a lot easier to shape baguettes without them sticking.

The past twelve months have been a heck of a journey, and life's about to get even crazier.  I'm definitely going to keep baking, if only to help me stay sane.  I'd ask you to wish me luck, but the last time I tried that, COVID happened.  So wherever you are out there, I hope you and your loved ones are well.  Break a leg!

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All content is licensed under the Creative Commons 4.0 By-NC license.  You are free to use content on this page for non-commercial applications, provided that you correctly attribute its source to this blog.