St. Patrick’s Day is less than a week away, not that I’m Irish, but for some reason, this strange little holiday was part of our family’s soul. It was always a big deal at our home growing up. Trying to get some green on before someone pinched you was job #1. Then after that is was eating green food all day long.
Green cake, green cookies, green milk, green cream of wheat. Yuck! Just about everything except for green eggs and ham and that only because mom didn’t figure out how to make them green too.
So as an adult, I learned to make some real Irish food to celebrate the day; Éire go Brách (Ireland forever)! Things like corned beef, red potatoes, and cabbage or Irish stew with Soda Bread. If you want to do the same, you can find plenty of help online, but trying to find a real sourdough soda bread, it might be a bit harder.
Here have included two. The first is the usual quick bread made with discard or active stater, but neither fermented long enough to mitigate the irritants nor release the nutrition found in whole grain flour. But as a quick bread, you can have this ready for a meal in 45 minutes or less.
The second, recipe uses a long ferment. This does remove irriatnts and delivers the vitamins and minerals that whole grain promises, just much more slowly
So here is our take on this quick traditional bread.
Quick Irish Soda Bread (adapted from the Moses Family Table)
Ingredients
- 3 ½ cups/438g all-purpose flour (or substitute ½ cup/63 g with freshly milled whole wheat)
- 1 cup/226g sourdough starter (active, dormant, or discard, they all work fine)
- 1 cup/240g cream (or milk and 4 Tbls/57g melted butter added)
- 1 teaspoon/5g baking soda
- ½ tsp/3g salt
- 1 cup/144g dried currants (or raisins)
- zest of an orange
- 3 Tbls/64g honey or brown sugar
Directions
- Preheat the oven to 400°F /205°C
- Sift flour, salt, and baking soda together in a mixing bowl.
- Stir in dried currants.
- In a separate bowl, whisk together honey, orange zest, and cream (or milk and butter) with your sourdough starter or discard.
- Combine the wet and dry ingredients, but stir just until combined.
- Form dough into a ball
- Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and place the dough on it.
- Slash in the top with a sharp knife making a “+” sign on top
- Place it into the preheated oven.
- Bake for 30 minutes, until golden brown and a testing skewer comes out clean when inserted.
- Let cool a bit before slicing or cutting into wedges, which is quite traditional. And don’t forget to insert a lucky coin into the bottom of the loaf before slicing—you know, for the luck of the Irish.
This bread is traditionally made with sour milk or buttermilk, but the lactic acid in a sourdough start reacts with the baking soda just as well. This forms tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide leading to a very quick rise in the loaf. Other ingredients can be added too. Things like butter and eggs will enrich the dough. Raisins, currents or nuts may also be added depending on your likes, but most recipes call for some dried fruit.
The advantage of making this “quick bread” is that the labor of traditional bread making can be skipped for a fast and reliable loaf every time. However, without a long-ferment, many of the advantages of traditional sourdough will not be realized.
Simple and good, you may find yourself using this recipe again and again. It works for well for muffins, baked in a loaf pan as a sweet bread and of course, as a traditional boule. And best of all it will be a great excuse to use any extra sourdough starter that you intend to discard, (which actually seems silly to me when you can make waffles and pancakes with sourdough discard every day of the week). That makes this recipe your no-excuse-to-use-the-extra-starter-bread ever again.
Long Ferment Sourdough Soda Bread (adapted from Aysha‘s recipe a TrueSourdough.com)
Ingredients
- 3 1/2 cups/438 g all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon/5g baking soda
- 1 teaspoon/6 g salt
- 1 1/4/300g cup buttermilk
- 1 cup/226g sourdough starter
- 1 cup/144g dried currants (or raisins)
Directions
- In the first bowl, whisk to combine the dry ingredients (flour, soda, and salt).
- In a second bowl, whisk the buttermilk and starter together until it is smooth.
- Stir in the currants.
- Combine the dry and wet ingredients into a sticky dough (this should only take a few moments; do not get carried away mixing). Add extra flour if the dough is too sticky.
- Cover and set this aside to ferment for 6–8 hours.
- When dough has completed this long ferment, preheat the oven to 400°F/205°C.
- Roughly shape the dough into a ball and place it onto a greased baking sheet.
- Use a dough scraper or a knife to make a large deep cut across the middle of the dough in two directions to make a ‘+’ across the dough ball.
- Bake the bread in the preheated oven for 30 to 40 minutes, until golden brown, and sounds hollow when tapped at the bottom.
- Cool on a wire rack before enjoying with some butter and honey!
Tell us how you used sourdough in your St. Patrick’s Day celebration in the comment section below.
A reader contacted me about the lack of ferment, there is NONE in this loaf. The starter is flat and inactive, but I suppose you could allow it to ferment if you like. However, the joy of this bread is using a discarded start that interacts with the soda to give the bread some pretty sudden spring. However, that said, my loaf was very dry. If I made this again I would add half a cube of melted butter and at least one egg to the wet ingredients before stirring them together.