Irish Soda Bread ☘️

Irish soda bread, so named because it gets its leavening from baking soda, is a traditional Irish bread that has as many variations as Ireland has shamrocks. I decided to try my hand at it for an office potluck to celebrate St Patrick’s Day, since I’m .1% Irish.*

  • 3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 cups buttermilk
  • 1 tbsp sugar
  • 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp salt

Whisk together dry ingredients and stir in buttermilk only until mostly incorporated. Scrape into Dutch oven that has been liberally coated with oil OR lined with parchment, and smooth the top as best you can. Bake covered at 400⁰ 15 minutes; uncover and bake 30 minutes more. Allow to sit 10 minutes, then turn out onto cooling rack. Cool completely before slicing with serrated knife for best results. Serve with butter and/or jam, or fry slices for a traditional Irish ulster fry breakfast.

Yes, it’s supposed to look this rustic!
With authentic Irish butter – yum!
*My mother’s maternal grandmother, Mahalia “Haley” O’Rear Knight, whose great-great-great-great-great-grandfather John O’Rea came to Virginia from his native Ireland in the 1670s.
At work in all my Irish finery
Advertisement

2 thoughts on “Irish Soda Bread ☘️

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.