RECIPE: Irish Soda Bread with Caraway Seeds and Currants

I am SUPER-PREPPED for St. Patrick's Day tomorrow, I mean r-e-a-d-y. Corned beef brisket? Check! It's absolutely gorgeous and ready for the slow-cooker. Cabbage? You betcha, complete with butter, salt and pepper to adorn it. Baby carrots? Darn tootin'. I switched them out for the boiled potatoes because I felt like the meal needed a little color.

But the pièce de résistance? It would have to be the Irish soda bread I baked earlier today, which you can see in the picture undergoing some kind of sweating process: I read about fifty different recipes and nearly all of them urged me to wrap it up and let it sit overnight, hinting strongly that I'd be missing out of some kind of extra taste sensation if I served it hot from the oven.

So my two loaves of bread are having their spa treatment so we've not had the smallest taste. If I could go by the aroma they produced while baking, I'd say this recipe is a winner. Not to mention the fact that it was really very easy to prepare, one of those recipes you can throw together in a matter of minutes that still has you coming off looking like some kind of kitchen genius.

Irish Soda Bread with Caraway Seeds and Currants

Ingredients:

6 cups of flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
2/3 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 eggs, lightly beaten
4 cups buttermilk

1 cup currants
2 teaspoons caraway seeds

Directions:

Stir beaten eggs into the four cups of buttermilk in a small mixing bowl; set aside. Combine all dry ingredients (except for currants and caraway seeds); add buttermilk/egg mixture slowly, stirring only until all dry ingredients are incorporated. Stir in currants and caraway seeds.

Divide the dough in two and pour into two standard loaf pans that have been sprayed with non-stick cooking spray. For a more traditional loaf, shape into two boules on two baking sheets lined with parchment. Allow to sit on the counter for half an hour to give the chemical leavening action of the baking soda and buttermilk to occur. At the end of that time, slash a cross in the dough and bake in pre-heated 325 degree oven for approximately fifty minutes. Bread is done when a cake tester inserted into the middle of the loaf comes out clean.

Yield:

Two standard loaves or two rustic boules. You can try for one large boule, but you'll have to bake it longer and I'm not sure how much longer that would be.


Serve with melted butter and honey or jam for a teatime treat, or serve with dinner.

RECIPE: Honey-Oatmeal-Bread w/ Sunflower Seeds (in the bread machine)

I've been in a bread-making kind of mood lately; really, just a cooking kind of mood, trying out some new things here and there, but the thing I've had the most success with is the bread. Especially this recipe that I kind of put together myself, with the help of the little cookbook that came with my bread maker.

The bread, pictured on the left with that loaf of brioche I rescued last week, is made with white flour and includes oatmeal, honey and sunflower seeds, which makes it so delicious as a sandwich bread - I can highly recommend it with sliced turkey and mayo, although I really need a sliced ripe tomato to be completely certain.

This makes a nice little one-and-a-half pound loaf, so if you have a smaller bread machine that only makes one pound loaves, beware: you will have a dreadful mess to clean up. If you'd like more bread from the recipe and your machine can handle the volume, double the recipe and set your bread maker on the Dough option; take it out and put in in your own two bread pans and allow it to do its final proofing on your kitchen counter until the dough has doubled in size. Bake it at 350 degree for around forty minutes. Keep your eye and nose on it.

Honey-Oatmeal Bread with Sunflower Seeds (bread machine)

Ingredients:

7 1/2 ounces milk (7 ounces + 1 tablespoon), warmed to 90^o - 100^o
3 tablespoons honey
2 cups bread flour
1 cup old-fashioned or quick-cooking oats
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
3 tablespoons cold butter, cut into four chunks
2 teaspoons active dry yeast OR 1 1/2 teaspoons fast rise yeast

1/4 cup sunflower seeds (salted or unsalted, your pref)*

Directions:

Place ingredients in bread machine's baking pan in the order in which they're listed, placing the chunks of cold butter at each corner of the pan. Set the machine to your selected choices and go read your book. (Unless you're using the Dough setting, and then go do whatever you want to do until you need to deal with the dough.)

*My bread machine has a timer that lets me know when I can add things like sunflower seeds, nuts, raisins, etc. It comes after the first initial big stirring and this allows the added extras to not be ground up by the machine's strong kneading action. If your bread maker has such a setting, add the sunflower seeds. If it doesn't have this setting, just throw the sunflower seeds in with everything else.

Yield:

One 1 1/2 pound loaf