I decided to embrace my children’s Irish heritage last night and make my first attempt at soda bread. After a few minutes’ searching on Google, I found a recipe that fit my most important requirement – no buttermilk. I don’t keep it in the house, and I can’t stand the waste of driving the the store for one item.
So here it was! Shared on an expat board…surely, if this is recommended by a real Irishwoman, it should be wonderful. Right?
It certainly looks beautiful…
…and it feels nice, with a good, hollow thumping sound when I tap it. (See how creative I got, monogramming it in place of the traditional cross-hatching?)
Yeah, but.
It tastes like baking soda.
Now, I know it’s called soda bread, but you’re not supposed to TASTE the soda. Are you? I don’t recall ever tasting baking soda in soda bread before.
Blech.
Today, I found it was fine once toasted and slathered with peanut butter, jam, and fresh strawberries. (Thanks for the suggestion, Mom!) I can’t decide if I’m going to be stubborn enough to play around with this recipe and try to “fix” it, or if I’ll just break down and attempt to think enough ahead to have buttermilk on hand for the next time I want to make it.
In THIS Life 
3 comments
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March 18, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Miriam
You can make your own ‘fake’ buttermilk by combining milk with either vinegar or lemon juice (1 tbsp in a cup of milk), let it sit for 5 mins or so. I never buy buttermilk, but sometimes make ‘buttermilk’ pancakes this way, using lemon juice since we have a tree, the rest of the lemon juice goes on top of the pancakes 🙂
March 19, 2009 at 7:04 am
Julie
I was just going to make the same comment as Mim. We never buy buttermilk and use vinegar instead. It really does work.
March 25, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Angelina
Ha! I finally have you in my reader!
You know, I have never really been a soda bread fan. It is usually too gummy and dense for me. I’ve had it made by several people and it always seems the same. Even my friend Chelsea’s soda bread was not that great and she could qualify for Michelin stars for her home cooking.
I keep hoping to find one I like.
As to buttermilk…I never have it around and then when I do there’s always some left over that goes bad. So I tend to avoid recipes that call for it too. But maybe what we need to do is embrace buttermilk and collect tons of recipes that call for it and just always have it.