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Brown Soda Bread With Oats

5.0(760)

For years I’ve been trying to make a moist soda bread loaf like the kind I love to eat when I’m in Ireland. Finally I’ve achieved it with this recipe, which is adapted from Bon Appétit’s recipe for Fallon & Byrne Soda Bread (Fallon & Byrne is a restaurant in Dublin). The bread is a whole-wheat loaf with both rolled and steel-cut (pinhead) oats, and does not have the hard crust that round soda breads can have. One reason is that the moist dough is baked at a lower temperature than free-form soda bread.

by Martha Rose Shulman·published 2014-03-17

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IrishBreakfast, Brunch, Dinner, Lunch, Side Dish

Servings

1 loaf, about 12 slices

Total time

Calories / serving

182 kcal

Ingredients (9)

serves

Soft butter for the bread pan
125 grams (approximately 1 cup) whole-wheat flourwhole-wheat-flour
62 grams (approximately 1/2 cup) unbleached all-purpose or bread flourflour
25 grams (2 rounded tablespoons) steel-cut oats, either regular or quick-cooking
40 grams (approximately 1/3 cup) rolled oatsrolled-oats
8 grams (approximately 2 teaspoons, tightly packed) brown sugarbrown-sugar
3.5 grams (1/2 teaspoon) saltsalt
10 grams (2 teaspoons) baking soda, siftedbaking-soda
290 grams (approximately 1 1/4 cups) buttermilkbuttermilk

Instructions (4 steps)

01Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter an 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 x 2 1/2-inch bread pan.
02In a large bowl, mix together flours, steel-cut oats, rolled oats, brown sugar, salt and sifted baking soda. Mix well with your hands.
03Make a well in the center of flour mixture. Pour in buttermilk. Working from the center of the bowl in concentric clockwise circles, with fingers outstretched, stir buttermilk into flour mixture. (You can use a rubber spatula instead if you don’t like getting dough on your hands.) This should take about a half a minute at most. Dough will be quite moist. Use a rubber spatula to scrape into bread pan and smooth out the dough to fill pan evenly ( the pan will be filled only about halfway.)