The Easiest Scottish Soda Bread Recipe - Larder Love (2024)

FAQs

What flour is soda bread made from? ›

For the Irish Soda Bread:

4 cups (510 g) all-purpose flour, see notes below for making it whole grain. 2 teaspoons (12 g) kosher salt. 1 tablespoon (13 g) sugar. 1 teaspoon (5 g) baking soda.

Soda-bread flour is hard to come by outside of Northern Ireland, so if you can't find it, you can use self-raising flour and add some bicarbonate of soda. The egg is optional, but it gives the finished product an extra richness.

The most traditional doneness test calls for thumping the hot bread in the center to hear if it's hollow-sounding. A more foolproof indication is temperature; the loaf will register 200°F to 205°F when an instant-read thermometer is inserted in the center of the bread.

Mortons Soda Bread Flour 1.5Kg - Tesco Groceries.

If your Irish soda bread is too crumbly, it may be because you overmixed the dough. Another possibility is that your baking soda was expired and should be replaced. Make sure you are using the correct amount of baking soda in the recipe. Too much or too little can result in a crumbly loaf.

The oldest recipe for soda bread, widely syndicated from Ireland's Newry Times in 1836, says the dough was "as soft as could possibly be handled...the softer the better." Thirteen years and 180 miles down the road, the Waterford Times described it as "wetter than pie crust, too stiff to pour, but not stiff enough to ...

The original recipe, dating back to 1836, featured four simple ingredients: Flour, salt, (an acid to interact with the Soda), and Bicarbonate of Soda. The acid element initially involved dilute hydrochloric acid, but practicality led to the adoption of sour milk or buttermilk left from butter-making.

While soda bread is most famously attributed to Ireland, it was actually first created by Native Americans. They were the first to be documented using pearl ash, a natural form of soda formed from the ashes of wood, to leaven their bread without yeast. The Irish later discovered and replicated the process.

Irish soda bread has a couple of other names, too: When we attended a class at the famous Ballymaloe Cookery School in County Cork, Ireland, they made this loaf and called it a Spotted Dog. It's also called white soda bread, American Irish soda bread, or fruit soda bread.

Can I use baking powder instead of baking soda in soda bread? ›

Baking soda – This will react with the buttermilk in the bread to help provide balanced acid-base reaction and proper rise. Baking powder– This will also be used to help make the bread rise. Make sure your leavening agents are fresh and not expired.

Most “00” flour that we see in the United States is ground from durum wheat and has a mid-range protein content of about 11 to 12%, similar to all-purpose white flour.

In my experience, one of the things that puts people off soda bread is the bitter tang of bicarbonate of soda, so it's important to get the balance right: just enough to raise the bread, but not enough to taint the flavour.

What would make soda bread chewy or gummy? Too much liquid added, or it hasn't been baked enough. It should go on the top shelf of the oven and it should be baked for at least 30-35 minutes.

Because soda bread is not yeasted bread, kneading it just makes it dense and hard. To develop its trademark soft crumb, you touch the dough as little as possible while shaping it. If you prefer a chewier kneaded bread texture but don't want to put in all that work, try our easy No-Knead Bread recipe.

*If you don't have access to KA's whole meal Irish-style flour, you can substitute Whole wheat pastry flour. It will be finer, and the loaf a be a bit moister, but it is an adequate substitute.

Although plain flour can be used in a pinch for our Easy Bread, generally a bread recipe would call for a bread flour, or a “strong” flour. For soda bread however, using a flour with a higher concentrate of protein (ie. gluten) – such as a bread/strong flour – is a waste. A simple plain flour is all that is required!

Irish “brown” flour is much “weaker” (lower in gluten) than American whole-wheat flour—good for the delicate texture of Irish brown bread and for pastry, but not so good for yeast breads. Nothing in America is quite like it.

Irish wholemeal flour is milled from lower protein soft winter wheat and contains less of the strength-forming elasticity found in all-purpose flour, bread flour, and other wheat flours (which are made with higher protein hard winter wheat).