Irish Soda Bread

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is Irish Soda Bread, which was just perfect as we just celebrated St. Patrick’s Day! The hosts for this recipe are Carla at Chocolate Moosey and Cathleen at My Culinary Mission. You can check out their blogs to get the complete recipe, but I can tell you the recipe is pretty simple! This bread contains just flour, salt, baking soda and buttermilk. You’ll also want to check out the Tuesdays with Dorie site to see posts from all of the TWD bloggers participating this week.

I always thought that Irish Soda Bread should have raisins or currants, but this recipe said that was not traditional. I did some research (by looking at UK food websites) and that seems to be the case. I’d made Irish Soda Bread before but I guess mine wasn’t authentic. I made this bread to serve with Guinness beef roast that we were having for dinner and it was the perfect accompaniment. Since my oven was busy making the roast, I baked this in my microwave/convection oven. I know it’s a convection oven but I get a bit nervous using it for some reason.

This is probably the quickest Tuesdays with Dorie recipe I have ever put together. My dough was super sticky so I ended up adding a bit more flour to make it workable. I baked it up and it was a bit crooked, I’m not sure if that was due to my shaping of the loaf or how it baked. It doesn’t really matter. I think I could have baked it just a touch longer, as it seemed a little doughy at the bottom part of the bread. It was great served with the dinner we had, so the timing for this was great. I may try this again and bake it in my regular oven to see if it turns out differently.

Recipe from Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan