The Baker's Dozen: Irish Soda Bread

 The Baker's Dozen: Irish Soda Bread

Sadly, this was another fail. It's been a really long time since I've made or had soda bread. Is it supposed to be so dry you almost choke on it unless it's smothered in an unhealthy amount of butter? And is it supposed to be as hard as a brick? If so, it was a smashing success. I'm not going to share the recipe, because it didn't work out well. I thought it would be fun to make it this week since St. Patrick's Day is this week. I don't really celebrate the holiday, but it felt like the right time to make it. I'll have to keep trying out recipes, surely a good one exists, somewhere...Anyway, here's the pictures of how it went.

The obligatory ingredient shot. I went with actual buttermilk this time instead of making my own. Because soda break relies on the chemical reaction between the baking soda and the buttermilk, I wanted the real thing.

Here is all the dry ingredients blended together, pre-butter.

And post-butter. I used a pastry cutter, but it's not really a lot of butter for the whole recipe.

This is how it looks after mixing the buttermilk in. It was pretty dry still. I think it could have used maybe another 1/2 cup to blend a little better.

This was after a lot of blending and kneading. It's possible because it was on the dry side and took so much work to make it usable, that it got overmixed, which led to some of the dryness and hardness issues.

I still managed to get it into a round(ish) loaf.

And the x scored on the top. It took nearly twice as long for this bread to bake as it called for. That didn't help either. I covered it with foil and at one point had to cut it in half just to see if it was baked through, even though I didn't want to. It still wasn't so I had to keep baking the two halves for a while longer.

Here is the very dry final product. The flavor isn't too bad. It's a bit on the sweet side, but not overly so. There's brown sugar in it, but not too much.

So, I now have two weeks in a row of fails! I have three weeks left of this project, so I hope I can get some more wins by the end!!