Baking Soda Bread In Wendy's Kitchen

After having finished my blissful swim I quickly cycled over to Wendy's Kitchen to bake Soda Bread. I was amazed how (relatively) easy it is to make ... and it took almost no time at all ...

All I had to do was to bring the ingredients, my camera, my recorder and carefully watch Wendy's every move ...

My work started later at home putting it all on the boo and the blog :)

here the detailed account of it all:

let's start with the necessary ingredients and "tools of the trade".

wholemeal flower (you can also use white flour - in fact we used half and half)

buttermilk, baking powder, salt, yoghurt ( which we ended up not using .. but topping up with regular milk)

250gr of wholemeal flour

to which Wendy added 250gr of white flour

Wendy's friend Helen suggested we also put a pit of oatmeal into the mixture

to add a bit of bite to the bread.

all of it got transferred into the mixing bowl

to which Wendy added 4 tea spoons of baking powder - baking powder contains bicarbonate of soda - which I didn't know :)

now for 10gr of salt ( better you measure the salt with separate scales - you don't want to end up with too much salt)

.add the measured salt to the mixture

add 300ml of buttermilk - this pot only contained 285ml ...

...so Wendy made up for it by adding milk which she first poured into the empty buttermilk cup so to use up all available rests that might have stuck to the wall of the cup.

start mixing it all together

finishing off by using your hands ... you'll get a good feel of the dough

separate into two same sized roundish parts

place them both on a baking tray -

they don't have to be perfectly round - leave looking "rustic"

use a knife to make a cross ...

... cut almost all the way to the bottom of the dough

time to pop it into your preheater (gas mark 6 - 200C) oven

set your timer

Wendy started off by setting hers to 20 minutes -

we ended up adding 5 min to that - for a total of 25 min.

time to have a browse around Wendy's garden .. et voila ...

time's up and the 2 lovely loafs of Soda Bread are done

final test to see whether they are really done : turn the bread on its head and gently tap the bottom - it should sound hollow

perfect - now let them cool down

Wendy in her element - another great piece of baking!

She kindly rolled the freshly baked soda bread into a tea towel and handed it it me ... it was still a bit warm .. by now I was really hungry - the lovely smell didn't help ;)

I cycled home as fast as I could !

10 min. later I took the 2 pieces of soda bread out and broke 2 lovely pieces off

beautiful!

Shirley was still home (she had been for a run and was famished too!) Shirley had her piece with homemade butter and pure, pure Austrian) honey - I had mine with homemade butter and Carl Reynold's homemade marmalade - simply DELICIOUS!

Thank you Wendy!

make sure you listen to Wendy as she takes you through the process