Soda bread

Soda bread... in this case, also known as “the bread that would not cook”. This bread should be an easy one. But it’s been giving me a little bit of jip.

So, why should this be an easy one? Well, this bread is fairly well known as being leavened without yeast, so there’s no long process of watching it double in size, knocking it back and then letting it prove. You throw the ingredients together, you get them evenly mixed, you shape them and then you throw them in the oven. This was done at college too, under tutor supervision, so you would have thought that it should have gone right. My tutors were actually getting a tad frustrated too...

The bread as done with our college recipe starts with 2kg plain white flour, 4 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda, 4 teaspoons cream of tartar and 4 teaspoons salt, all chucked in one of our large machine mixing bowls. Not the way I’ve got used to doing things at home. I’m more accustomed to mixing dough with my hands and, it seems, the gimmicks are true; you get a much better understanding of your dough and how it behaves by handling it... well, by hand. Anyway, to the dry ingredients I added 600ml whole milk and 600ml double cream. I then got told by my tutor that the recipe didn’t specify enough liquid. *deadpan face* So I threw in an unspecified amount of extra milk and cream and let the dough mix, using a dough hook on a low speed, until it came together as a soft dough and any claggy bits were mixed out.

Time to unceremoniously plonk the dough out onto a worktop and follow my tutor round like a lost sheep to ask her what needed doing next (not that I don’t know what to do with bread dough; I just needed to make sure I was doing it college’s way). I managed to grab her attention and she told me to cut it into 4. We turned 2 of the pieces into herby soda bread by kneading dried mixed herbs into the dough. This being college, the pieces of dough were shaped in several ways to get practice in a few different shaping techniques. I did a traditional soda bread shaping; the dough was formed into a circle, into which I cut a large cross. One of the other pieces of dough became a stick; I pushed it into a rectangle shape, folded one third over the middle third, then the final third over this. I again flattened it out a bit, then folded it in half; all of this folding was to create a “spine” to reinforce the stick and control the way it rises in the oven. It then got a bit of rolling to create a thinner stick shape and 3 slashes across the top. The last 2 got shaped into plaits; the dough was formed into a sausage shape, cut into 3 but with the top still whole, and then plaited. All 4 went in the oven at 180°C.

Another deadpan face moment. All that the recipe said as to timings was that the timing varied according to the size of the loaf. So I gave them 20 minutes. They were nicely coloured but the bottom-tap test wasn’t positive on all of them (my tutor gave me the additional tip of saying that it could be checked like a cake, by inserting a sharp knife or skewer and checking for dough or stickiness on the end). But even when it did sound hollow... I did some a few days later and the bread was for service, so actually needed to be ready that morning. The bottom-tap test on said bread suggested that it was ready, and my tutor agreed. But no; when it was cut into, the middle was still raw. My tutor managed to salvage one loaf by putting it back in the oven, but even then it took ages and we had to take cross-sections of the bread each time to check how done it was.

Anyone got any soda bread tips? Is this just a bit of a duff recipe or are there special ways of telling how it’s done? Because continually producing raw bread with a recipe that’s supposed to be easy is beginning to get on my nerves.