How To Make Irish Soda Bread

This isn’t the classic, plain bread you would eat with dinner. It’s more of a dessert bread, sweet, with raisins. Feel free to leave out the raisins and the sugar on top if you want to make it as a dinner bread.

Ingredients

4 cups white flour
½ cup raw sugar
1 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ cup melted butter
1½ cup buttermilk
1 egg
1 cup brown raisins
1 cup white raisins
2 tbsp raw sugar (yes, sugar is listed twice)

Directions

But first … a quick note about “authenticity”.

After posting this, I got a bunch of comments pointing out that “authentic” soda bread doesn’t have eggs. Or raisins. Or buttermilk. Or … but you get the idea. And all of these comments are absolutely correct. This isn’t “authentic”. What it is, is tasty.

Authentic soda bread is dry, hard and flavorless. Check out Jules’ comment below for the full historical significance of it. In short, it’s an important cultural touchpoint for a lot of people, like the matzo that’s eaten at Passover.

Versions with raisins are more correctly called “spotted dog”. And this version would be considered a cake, not a bread, by real traditionalists.

Now that that’s out of the way, on with the recipe …

Mix all the dry ingredients together.

Get your daughter to beat the egg and stir in the buttermilk.

Add the wet ingredients to the mixing bowl.

Stir briefly before adding the butter.

You don’t want to add the hot butter directly to the egg, or the egg will cook. Now add the butter.

Mix well. Scrape the sides occasionally to get everything incorporated.

Make sure you get all the way down to the bottom. Dough hooks tend to leave a bit of dry ingredients on the bottom.

Once the wet and dry ingredients are well mixed, add the raisins.

Mix on slow.

This dough is very thick, and tends to wrap around the mixer. I’ve done this by hand before. I don’t recommend it unless you’re trying to get in a workout at the same time.

Scoop the dough out evenly into two floured pie tins. This dough will not pour.

Shape each portion into a round loaf.

You should have two even loaves.

Sprinkle a tablespoon of raw sugar on the top of each loaf. Don’t measure, lay it on heavy.

You should have a generous coating over the whole loaf.

Bake at 375° for 40 minutes, or until the top is golden brown.

Insert a knife into the thickest part. If there is dough on it when you pull it out, put the loaves back in for another five minutes. Don’t use a toothpick. The crust is very stiff, and can clean any wet dough off as you pull it out. The first picture below shows a little dough right near the tip, the next came out clean (except for some sugar from the top) five minutes later.

The finished loaves will be dark tan with a deeply-cracked surface.

The raw sugar sprinkled on top leaves a sweet crystalline crust.

Serve with plenty of butter. Keep leftovers to make French toast the next morning. Seriously, you want to do the French toast. It’ll be the best you’ve ever had.

This last image links to a closeup of the deep crevices in the crust.

And that’s it.