Soda Bread

So this is quite an old bake (it was a couple of weeks ago now)...  Soda bread, and home-made butter!

Again, this is a fabulous baker brothers recipe, so I'm not going to post the details.  I can tell you what I did though.

The first job was to whip up some double cream, and keep whipping until it separated into butter and buttermilk.  My little electric mixer wasn't happy with this but it soldiered on!

Looks disgusting, right?  However, this did leave me with butter and buttermilk...

And wrapping the butter up made it look a bit better!

So now what?  Well, the principle of this recipe is that you take wholemeal flour, salt, baking soda and buttermilk.  Mix it all together, throw it in the oven.  Buttermilk is acidic, reacts with the baking soda, makes carbon dioxide, bread rises.  Vinegar (ethanoic acid) would have the same effect, and I think this is in some recipes!

So, mixed it together, slapped it on a baking tray, cut a deep cross in it with my dough scraper, put it in the oven.

Baked it, it rose in the oven, it looked like this when it came out:

Looks pretty good eh?  Broke it apart, put some of the home-made butter on, ate it with a stew (done in the slow cooker).  Life was pretty good that night!!  I might have to also write a blog post about the stew, even though that definitely wasn't baking.

Next time I do it, I won't be doing the home-made butter thing and will just buy buttermilk.  It made over 500g of butter, and I'm still using it!  Also, it probably would have risen slightly better if I'd remembered to distribute the baking soda all the way through the flour before adding the buttermilk.  Even so, it was good fun, it tasted brilliant, and it mopped up my gravy. Winner!

Bye,
Bob x