Listening to: Eagle-Eye Cherry - Save Tonight (90s Alternative FTW!)
Welcome to January, the month of bread! Or...Bread Month...or possibly known as one of the most challenging months of my baking blog's lifetime. I'm not too experienced in baking bread but it was my sister's idea for January so I went with it!
I used to make zucchini bread ALL THE TIME at my house growing up. It used to be a pain having to cut/chop/food process the zucchini and that was quite possibly my least favorite part of making this bread when I was younger. The recipe made two loafs of moist, delicious breakfast or snack bread. It's a sweet bread so most would disagree with eating this for breakfast; however, in my family, there is never a BAD time for sweets...can you say helllllooooo cavities?!
This is probably the only type of bread I've tackled in my years...well besides scrumptious cinnabuns that I made in the beginning of my baking blog time. I've never had a huge interest in baking bread but now that I think about it, it's pretty simple depending on what type of bread you are making.
It was Dominic's idea for me to make Irish Soda Bread this past weekend to kick off bread month (he's half Irish). I've never had it before so I thought hey, what the heck! It turns out that traditional soda bread is usually really plain and simply made. After doing some research to find the right recipe, I learned that TRADITIONAL soda bread doesn't have ANY of the following:
"Zest", orange or any other kind, Irish whiskey, honey (substitute for sugar), sugar (see definition of "cake"), eggs (see definition of "cake"), garlic (not common in English/Irish dishes), shortening , double cream, sour cream, yogurt, chocolate, chiles/jalapenos, or fruit (Only in Christmas/Easter cakes and other special occasions). This info came from http://www.sodabread.info/ which has information on traditional soda bread recipes.
However, many of the recipes I came across included at least one egg, raisins and in some cases, caraway seeds. I decided to go with one that had one egg and raisins in it after taking MOST of the advise from the soda bread website above. You can find the recipe here. It had good reviews and seemed like more of the traditional recipe. This bread DOESN'T require lots of kneading and it turned out that I didn't have to go out and buy any ingredients for it!
What I did for the buttermilk: I made my own buttermilk because they only had a larger carton in the store. In the past, I've used cream of tartar and skim milk but this time I used white vinegar and 2% milk (I didn't have skim at the time). The recipe calls for 1 3/4 cup buttermilk so I used 1 3/4 tablespoon white vinegar and filled milk up to 1 3/4 in a liquid measuring cup. You let it sit for about 5 minutes and there you have your buttermilk!Everything else was extremely simple--I used a lightly floured baking sheet to place the round bread loaf on and stuck it in the oven. There were issues with the oven I was using so I had to place it on 350 degrees instead of 425. The bread cooked for closer to an hour this way. Yes, the dough will be sticky and yes, this means it is VERY hard to score the bread. It still cooked through and came out delicious :)
I recommend including the raisins...this adds a little sweetness to the otherwise very plain bread. They say it's best to eat right from the oven; however, you can heat it up in the toaster or oven later on, put some butter on it, and it's just as great.
Enjoy!
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