Michele: I'm Michele, and I'm the host of Heritage Gourmet.
Today we're making Irish soda bread.
This recipe comes from the mother of a family friend of mine, Mary Niemiec,
in Chicago, Illinois.
Mary's mom grew up in County Kerry, Ireland.
And this is her recipe.
We're going to start making the soda bread by mixing our dry ingredients together.
So we have the flour, the sugar, baking powder.
According to the Society for the Preservation of Irish Soda Bread,
the first mention of Irish soda bread comes from a London magazine
referencing an Irish newspaper back in 1836.
There are several different types of Irish soda bread.
There's sweet.
There's savory.
There's white flour.
There's wheat flour, raisins, no raisins.
What they all have in common is their leavening agent, bicarbonate of soda--
baking soda.
The idea of using baking soda as a leavening didn't originate in Ireland.
Precursors to what we now know as baking soda include potash,
or pearl ash, or potassium carbonate, basically lye solids mixed with hardwood ashes.
When the great famine hit Ireland in the 1840s, yeast became even harder to procure.
Also the Irish tended to use a softer type of wheat often imported from America, as opposed
to the British who used a harder type of wheat.
But it was discovered if you added baking soda to the soft wheat,
it produced a reliable loaf of bread.
There are two schools of thought regarding raisins in soda bread.
I happen to be team raisin.
But if you're not, that's OK.
You can leave them out.
When I was in Ireland, I rented a cottage on a farm in Kerry.
And my lovely hosts left me a loaf of Irish soda bread for breakfast
along with fresh butter, fresh jam, and fresh cream from their cows for my coffee.
The country has a long history of creating excellent dairy products.
Legend has it that on May Day, a traditional spring holiday, the fairies might show up
and steal your butter.
According to the Irish Farmers Association, there
are 18,000 modern day dairy farmers in Ireland, all
working to produce the butter and cheese products the country is known for.
Speaking of butter, we're adding 2 tablespoons of cold, cubed butter to our dough.
And we're just going to work it in until it resembles large crumbs.
You can use a pastry cutter or two forks or just your fingers, like me.
It takes a minute or two to work the butter into the dough,
especially if you're going around raisins.
Perfect-- that looks good.
Now we're adding two beaten eggs to the dough.
And you just want to give that a good stir.
Now to that, we're going to add our buttermilk.
Just slowly stream it in to the dough.
There.
Now stir with the wooden spoon until you reach the point where you can't stir anymore.
This dough is going to get really thick.
Now that most of our wet ingredients are incorporated,
we're going to turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface
and knead it just a little so that it comes together.
You just don't want it to stick.
It's a sticky, shaggy dough.
But it should hold together.
That looks good.
Now that our dough has come together, we're going to put it in a greased cast iron skillet.
You want a 10 to 12-inch skillet.
Just plop the dough in there.
We're baking this bread in a cast iron skillet.
Because of the way the cast iron retains heat, it's
going to give this bread a great, crunchy exterior crust.
Now we're going to score the top of it with a sharp knife.
We're going to dot 2 tablespoons of butter over the top.
This will help it to bake up all golden brown and crispy.
So now this is ready to go in a 350 degree preheated oven for 45 minutes to an hour.
Now it's going go cool for about an hour.
It sometimes feels like in the United States, Irish soda bread
is a special seasonal treat that proliferates in grocery stores and bakeries
around St. Patrick's Day.
But in Ireland, it's served year round at casual family gatherings.
And now that you have this recipe, you too can have this bread year round.
Just watch out for the fairies.