The Soda Bread Experience

Okay, here's what we started with:

Ballyvolane House Brown Soda Bread
(Makes 2 Loaves)
1 1/2 lbs. wholemeal flour
1 handful wheat bran
2 handfuls wheat germ
2 1/4 lbs. pinhead oatmeal (aka chunky-grade)
2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. sieved baking soda
1 liter buttermilk

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease bread tins with butter.

Mix dry ingredients well.
Add buttermilk and stir until mixed thoroughly with the dry ingredients.
Divide mixture into 2 bread tins and sprinkle with a little additional pinhead oatmeal.
Bake for 1 hour on oven upper shelf.

Of course that meant ordering the "pinhead oatmeal" from amazon (thank you, Kate Walker, for your excellent sleuthing out of a US stockist). And I was particularly pleased in this case because I belong to amazon prime and so I got 2nd day shipping as a part of my regular fee. The FOUR BAGS of pinhead oatmeal duly appeared yesterday afternoon. I think I got more than my money's worth of shipping on that parcel alone!

Anyway, today I went to get the buttermilk at the grocery store, but it turns out that everyone and their Irish relatives are baking soda bread today (apparently) as there was a run on buttermilk (when else is there ever a run on buttermilk, for heaven's sake?), so all they had was half gallons of the stuff. No, thanks. We don't love buttermilk that much.

I came home and soured a liter of milk with some lemon juice. Basically the same thing. And then I greased my pans (more of them than two because it was quite clear that I was going to need more than two). And I mixed together all the ingredients.

Adding the liter of milk was, um, interesting. I thought I had way too much liquid. But give the oats two minutes and they've sopped it all up and are begging for more. I made two loaves of regular and two with raisins (because some of the soda bread I've eaten -- probably the adulterated American version) had raisins. I draw the line at caraway seeds though. Not putting those in.

I was supervised in this project by three hopeful dogs and a kiwi tea cosy. The kiwi tea cosy was a gift from Barbara Clendon of Barbara's Books in Auckland, NZ (well, close to Auckland anyway). When The Prof and I visited NZ three years ago, Barbara and her husband kindly invited us to stay with them. We had a wonderful time seeing Auckland and visiting with the Clendons. Barbara had a kiwi tea cosy I much admired -- and a few months later one came to live with us. Barbara had brought it from a bird sanctuary they'd visited near the Coromandel peninsula, I think. The kiwi takes a great interest in everything that goes on in the kitchen. He could barely keep his beak out of the soda bread.

They baked nicely while I cleaned the living room. And then I took them out - and discovered that the trickiest bit was getting them out of the pans. In fact the roundish loaf was, I thought, permanently welded to the pot in which I baked it. The one in the tin came out best, so I think the moral of the story is "use tin" not glass baking pans.

But whatever you use, line up lots of people to help you eat it because it makes enough to feed the Irish Army (does Ireland have an army? If so, they are welcome to come and share soda bread with us). The prof was gobbling up slices of it as I came upstairs to write this. I trust there will still be plenty when I go back downstairs. It's wonderful.

Flynn approves. So does The Prof -- and the kiwi.