STUART Bread Master Class - Soda Bread — katy & peter (2024)

KATY

Following on from the global success of Stuart’s first bread master class on Wednesday night, he led another family bread making video learning session with Stuart (catchy name). This time around we took on the humble soda loaf. This is a brilliant choice is you only have plain flour - I am well aware that bread flour seems difficult to attain right now. And again I’d note - we are amateurs (on the rise) and despite this all the loafs came out great. Dad knows what he is talking about. Additionally, soda bread is the kindest of bases - you can throw in a lot of different dry ingredients and it’ll still come out decent. For example - Ryan and I used plain flour, dried herbs and an assortment of cheese whereas Pete & Dais used rye bread flour, a nutty mix and dried fruit. It all worked.

Next time on FBMVLSWS - Make Your Own Starter Yeast & roti.

See below for images and then I’ll hand over to Dad.

STUART CAKEBREAD

Introduction

Soda bread is a secret of several million Irish friends and relatives. It’s brilliant, canny, quick and a bread for today. It’s also very ancient - they were making it when I was a child. It takes less time to make than walking to your corner shop and buying it (although this might depend on how far your corner shop is). And it is infinitely adaptable. So let’s go.

Ingredients

• Flour. Literally any flour: wholemeal, plain, rye, malted, spelt. You don’t need strong bread flour which I would keep for the pain au levain. You can even use gluten free.

• Liquid. Traditionally buttermilk (the result of the separation of double cream into butter and buttermilk), but thin yoghurt and lemon juice, whole milk and lemon juice, water, cider or pretty much anything else will suffice.

• Raising agent. Baking powder (“BP”) or bicarbonate of soda (sometimes called bicarbonate powder) (“BS”). BP is less strong than BS but does not need a neutralising agent such as lemon, buttermilk etc. Both work fine .

• Add ins. You can make perfectly good soda bread with just buttermilk, plain flour, baking powder and salt. But to quote Mr Trotter the world is your lobster when it comes to add ins. Walnut and honey go well. So does wholemeal flour and black treacle, Or cheese and herbs, Or dried fruit and nuts, You can add grains, seeds. Do what you fancy and experiment. 2 pints of Guinness. Pot of Irish stew.

Method - makes 2 loaves

1. Measure out 500g of your chosen flour or mix of flours into a large bowl.

2. Add 10g of salt, preferably sea or rock.

3. Mix in about 4 tsp of baking powder. If using BS you may need only about 1 or 2 tsp. Too much affects the flavour but not the rising.

4. Add 300ml of liquid.

5. Then add extras up to about 400g but it does not need to be anything like as much. All depends on your choices. Cheese is best grated and apricots and olives, for example, cut up. Treat honey or additional liquid as an add in not part of the 300ml of liquid.

6. Mix together then remove from the bowl on to a floured surface (any flour). Knead and form into 2 balls. We are talking about a couple of minutes, not like yeast bread, It just needs to be fairly smooth and pliable. You don’t need to stretch it.

7. If you have some, sprinkle/roll in rye flour for the crust. Don’t worry if you don’t have any. It will still be fine but you might dust with whatever flour you have.

8. Place on to a floured baking sheet. Cut a large cross, about knife width deep, into the top of the loaves effectively to make four quarters. Bring the oven to 200C or gas mark 6 and insert the baking tray and bread.

9. Stir the Irish stew.

10. Check after about 20/25 minutes. Remember the golden rule. You can undercook bread but you can’t really overcook it unless you have a mind to.

11. Remove from the oven when you are happy the loaves sound hollow and are cooked all through. Place on trivet to cool.

12. After about 30 mins pour another pint of Guinness and serve Irish stew with just warm soda bread with or without Irish butter.

Irish Soda Bread

And a final shout out to Belmond’s wonderful chef from our Hibernian train, Clodagh McKenna. She got me onto soda bread during a Guiness infused work do several month’s ago. She’s a joy to watch. Below I’ve linked a video that she’s recently uploaded where she’s making her own soda bread.