Irish Soda Bread

This past Sunday, I made one of our favorite soup recipes, minestrone soup. I normally serve it with focaccia bread, but I didn’t have time to make it. I do really need to add it to this website though! I only had about a couple hours before dinner so I was searching my favorite food blogger’s bread recipes and stumbled on alexandracooks.com Irish Soda Bread. It was actually really good! It comes out looking like a huge biscuit and takes less than an hour to make, including baking time. It is a less buttery than a biscuit, which makes it a good choice for a dip in your soup. This wasn’t the best homemade bread we have ever eaten, but it is really good, especially if you are short on time. We have been eating it all week with butter and jam and even peanut butter and just plain butter. I just put my bowls on my digital scale and added all of the ingredients by weight, which made it super easy too. This is already a more dense bread so I’m not sure that a wheat flour would work very well.

Ingredients

• 4 cups or 510 grams all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons or 12 grams course Celtic sea salt
• 1 tablespoon or 13 grams pure cane sugar
• 1 teaspoon or 5 grams baking soda
• 1 egg
• 1 3/4 cup buttermilk or 410 grams or whole milk mixed with 1 3/4 tablespoon lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons melted butter

Directions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

If you don’t have buttermilk and you are using milk and lemon juice, pour milk and lemon juice in a glass measuring cup and let sit for about 5-10 minutes while doing the next steps.

Grease a 9-10 inch cast iron skillet.

In a medium bowl, mix together flour, salt, sugar, and baking soda. I used a rubber spatula to do this so I wouldn’t get a lot of dishes dirty.

In another medium bowl, beat the egg and milk. Add the melted butter and continue mixing. Again, I used a rubber spatula for this so I wouldn’t get more dishes dirty.

Add the liquid ingredients to the dry ingredients.

Stir with your rubber spatula until combined and mixed through. This will be a very sticky dough.

Flour your hands really well and sprinkle some flour on the dough. Shape and knead the dough into a sticky ball. This was kind of messy.

Transfer the dough ball onto the greased cast iron skillet. It will be stickier than a normal bread dough ball.

Cut an X or a cross in the top of the bread.

Bake in the oven for 35-40 minutes. Mine was done at 35 minutes.

Let cool for 15 minutes.

Slice and enjoy right away!

This can be kept for a few days at room temperature in an airtight container. Mine is still fine after 4 days, but it has gotten a little more crumbly as the days go on. This can be frozen in slices as well.