The Irish Bread Of My Ancestors – Back To My Roots

Man cannot live on bread alone, but if I HAD to try…THIS is the bread I would request. And since St. Patrick’s Day is right around the corner I decided to repost this Irish Soda Bread recipe I created last year.

My Irish roots run deep…all the way across the pond to County Cork. (Remember my Bucket List?) When my mother was growing up, she was known as one of “The Grady Girls” in Kalona, Iowa. 

And even though this photo is in black and white, you can see her beautiful red hair, fair skin, and freckles galore – Irish through and through.

So in celebration of my heritage, I pulled out a few recipes for soda bread, but the ones I’ve tasted in the past were quite boring and tasteless, in my opinion. And I wanted to use only the ingredients I had in my pantry, so I created my own version. (Surprise, surprise!)

For those of you who don’t know me personally, I subscribe to the “dump and stir” style of cooking. I’ve cooked for so many years I rarely measure my ingredients, unless I’m creating a new recipe for the blog. I tend to create dishes “on the fly,” but baking is not as forgiving as cooking. Baking is a science that requires the right balance of ingredients to achieve the outcome you expect. But since I do like “living on the edge,” I removed several ingredients from the recipe I found and added several of my own. (What a rush for this old Meemaw!)

I wanted this bread to be slightly sweet and dense. So I added molasses and quick cooking steel cut oats. (And what could be more Irish than steel cut oats?)

But I knew that the oats would need to be softened before I added them to the dry ingredients or the bread would contain hard little grains of oats when baked. So I made sure to stir the dry oats into the WET ingredients first and let the mixture sit for about twenty minutes to soften the grains before I stirred the wet ingredients into the dry mixture. 

These golden raisins were a perfect addition to this recipe.

One of my MUST HAVE kitchen gadgets was invaluable today. That is my Bench Scraper! I have even found them recently at the Dollar Tree Store…for (you guessed it) A DOLLAR!

The dough for this bread should not be overworked, so the bench scraper helped me to knead the dough very lightly and scrape it into the prepared skillet in a perfect loaf shape. You NEED a bench scraper for many tasks in your kitchen…whether it’s working with dough, or scooping diced veggies into a pot without leaving a trail of them between your cutting board and the stove. Trust me on this one. You’ll thank me later!

I cut a deep cross shape into the dough. Want to know why? Click HERE for the answer!

The bread baked for about 40 minutes. (You’ll know when it’s done when you tap on the loaf like you’re knocking on a door and the sound is hollow.) And when I removed it from the oven I brushed the top with melted butter. Then I simply plucked off any raisins that were unsightly and blackened and sticking out of the loaf. Then I allowed the loaf to cool for just a minute. (I couldn’t wait any longer…and neither could my neighbors who had been smelling the loaf baking in my oven.)

The results were amazing, if I do say so myself. I shared the bread with my hungry neighbors, and I got a “thumbs up” from every single person.

I think my Grady Clan would have been dancing a jig if I could have shared it with them.

I hope your St. Paddy’s Day is filled with fun and laughter, and I can’t wait to share my new recipe with our grandkids in their kitchens. Another recipe to hand down…for generations to come!

And  let me leave you with a very untraditional Irish “blessing”…

“May those who love us, love us. And those who don’t May God turn their hearts. And if he doesn’t turn their hearts, May he turn their ankles so we’ll know them by their limping.”