The bread didn’t rise the first three times I tried it this winter. Not dramatically flat – not a frisbee – but low and dense, with a crumb that pressed back at you when you cut it. Grand for toast, Donal would have said, which is what he used to say about anything that came out wrong.
The bread
I make soda bread the way I was shown, which is not the way it appears in most books. No butter rubbed in. No egg. Just flour, bread soda, salt, and buttermilk, mixed quickly with one hand in a bowl that’s always the same bowl – wide, cream-coloured, a chip off the rim on one side. You don’t work the dough. That’s the thing most people miss. You barely touch it. Mix until it comes together, tip it out, shape it loosely, score a cross, into the oven. Maybe fifteen minutes of actual work, the rest of it waiting.
Donal added a handful of oats and always used more bread soda than anyone would recommend. His loaves came out slightly darker, with a bitter edge I never liked but he was attached to. He said the oats were for texture. I think he just liked throwing things in. He baked his in a cast-iron pot with the lid on for the first twenty minutes, which does give a good crust, I’ll allow him that. Mine goes straight on a floured tray, which is how my mother did it and how I’ll keep doing it until I’m told otherwise.
The buttermilk is the thing. It has to be proper buttermilk, the thin kind, not the thick cultured stuff that comes in small plastic tubs. The small shop in the village doesn’t always have it. Sometimes I get it in Castlegregory. When I can’t find it I’ve used milk with a spoon of vinegar stirred in and left to sit, which works well enough in a pinch, but you can tell.
What went wrong
The first loaf I made this winter came out in October, before the fire was properly going – I wrote about lighting the fire earlier this month, it’s been that kind of autumn. The oven wasn’t up to temperature, I think, or I didn’t give it long enough to get there. The inside was gummy. I ate it anyway, mostly toasted, over three days.
The second attempt I overdid the bread soda. I wasn’t measuring – I never measure exactly, which is the source of most of my problems and also, occasionally, a lucky outcome – and my eye was off. Too much soda and the bread has a smell to it, a metallic back-taste, and it rises fast and then sinks slightly in the centre as it cools. That batch went mostly to the compost bin, though I kept the heel and had it with soup.
The third loaf was better, except I’d used plain flour when I should have used the wholemeal, and the texture was wrong. Fine for a white soda, really, but not what I wanted. I wanted something with a bit of weight to it, something that would sit in you on a November morning when the lane outside is wet and the light’s taking its time coming up.
I rang Bríd about it, not specifically about the bread but it came up. She makes hers with a mix of flours, half and half, and she swears by a cold oven start, which I refuse to believe but which I haven’t tried.
Trying again
The fourth loaf was last week. I’d bought a fresh carton of buttermilk in Castlegregory, the right kind, slightly sour when you open it. I let the oven heat properly – twenty minutes at least. I used the scales, which I almost never do, and measured out 450g of wholemeal and 50g of plain, a level teaspoon of salt and just under a teaspoon of bread soda, which sounds fussy but I was trying to be honest with myself about where it had been going wrong.
You mix the dry ingredients first, make a well in the centre, pour in most of the buttermilk and bring it together with your hand. It should be shaggy and a little sticky, not smooth, and if it’s too dry you add the last bit of buttermilk. The dough should feel alive in a way that’s hard to describe – not elastic, not stiff, just barely cohered, like it’s agreeing to be bread only just.
I scored it deep, floured the tray, and gave it forty minutes. The kitchen smelled the way it should. The cross opened out properly as it baked, which is a thing you watch for. When I tapped the bottom it sounded hollow, which is the only test worth trusting.
It was good. Not the best I’ve ever made – I had one come out perfectly about two years ago, the week after Donal left for Cork, and I don’t think I’ve matched it since. But close. A proper crumb, slightly open, moist without being heavy. I had two slices with butter while it was still warm and another two with soup that evening, a soup I’d made from the last of the leeks in the garden.
I’ll make another one this week. I won’t use the scales again – I was only doing it to diagnose the problem and now I know what the problem was, near enough. Back to guessing by feel, which is slower to learn from but more satisfying when it works.
The bowl with the chipped rim is on the counter already.