Made without yeast, fat or eggs, homemade soda bread is one of life's simple pleasures. When I was a child in Ireland, my mother - like everyone's mother - seemed to make it every day. Brown or white, in loaves or scones, it took no time to mix, its fragrance greeting us as we walked in from school, promising a hot slice or two slathered with butter and jam and later, enjoyed as backup to homemade soup, cheese, smoked fish, bacon and eggs, pate or a mayonaisey salad. The last of the bread made breakfast; anything left after that went out to the hens.
Many years later, after my mother died and we'd all left home, my father took on the bread making. He had never cooked and was incredibly messy, but his scientific mind soon had him experimenting with every aspect of the process, from varying quantities of flours or buttermilk to oven temperatures and additional ingredients. By the time he had found what he wanted (and even my mother might have agreed his brown soda bread was even better than hers) his kitchen was coated in a permanent layer of sticky whiteness. As for quantities, like every Irishman he liked his soda bread freshly baked, so he simply cooked a whole soda cake, ate one quarter on the day it was cooked and froze the three remaining sections separately to thaw and eat over three more days.
On visits home, I often asked my father to write down his brown bread recipe. He never did. But I remember his strict routine on bread making days, visiting the kitchen in his dressing gown to turn on the oven, measuring out the wholegrain brown flour with a tablespoon of sesame seeds, then leaving them to grow plump in buttermilk while he showered and shaved.
My father claimed the fattened wholemeal and seeds were his secret. After that was just a matter of tipping the wet brown flour into the sieved white flour and bread soda, mixing all into a soggy dough and getting the cake in the hot oven without delay. That, as far as he was concerned, was that. A good time to read his newspaper and wait. He never did master the cleaning up.
Preheat your oven to gas mark 7/ 200 C
2 mugs of the best stone ground brown flour you can find
1 mug white flour
1 level tsp bread soda/bicarbonate of soda
A good pinch of salt & a grind of pepper
1 tsp sesame seeds/ 1 tbsp porridge oats
1 tsp sugar (optional)
Bread soda starts to fizz the minute it's wet, so success lies not only in the quality of your flour but in the speed and lightness with which you mix the buttermilk and get your loaf in the oven.
If you have time, soak the brown flour & sesame seeds in a little buttermilk for 30 minutes or so. Sieve the white flour with the bread soda, seasoning and add the sugar. Using a knife, quickly mix it into the brown, adding as much buttermilk as you need to make a sticky, puffy dough. Scatter a little white flour over the dough, roll it into a loose ball and transfer to a floured surface. Pat it into a round cake about 6cms high and cut with a cross about 2cms deep. Scatter flour on your preheated baking tray, brush a little buttermilk over the cake and bake in the centre of the oven for about 30 minuted or until you can hear a light drumming sound when you tap the base with your fingers.
For white bread, mix only good white flour, bread soda and salt with the buttermilk.
For a tea time version called 'Spotted Dog', mix in a level tablespoon of sugar and a handful of raisins & sultanas before adding the buttermilk.
