In my family, March is when you make Soda Bread. In honor of that delicious tradition, here’s my mom’s soda bread recipe! I won’t say it’s completely impossible to screw up, but you’d have to really try as it was the one thing I could bake when I was still at the point of calling my mom for help every time I touched my oven.
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 Tbs sugar
2 tsps baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 Tbs butter
1 cup buttermilk (I used dried and hydrate per instructions on the package)
1/2 cup currants
1 Tb caraway seeds
Pre-heat your oven to 375 F.
Sift flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in a large bowl.
Cut in the butter, using either your fingers or a fork, mixing until it looks grainy. Add the currants and caraway seeds.
Add the buttermilk, mixing with a fork until the ingredients are evenly moistened. This is going to give you a very wet and sticky dough, so you’re going to want to put some flour on your hands and maybe a little extra on the dough itself before trying to kneed it for a minute. It doesn’t need much, and usually it takes so much work to get the dough off my hands once I touch it (I’m not kidding about how sticky it is) that I count that as the kneeding. Then transfer the dough to a lightly greased cookie sheet and shape it into a circle that’s about 1.5″ thick. Cut an X on the top with a knife.
Bake for 30-40 minutes, until golden brown and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped. You want a “tock” sound, not a dull thud. From start to finish this recipe can be completed in an hour or less, which is great for people like me who are too impatient for most breadmaking, or are just prone to spontaneous bread cravings.
All photos in this post were taken by me
