FF – I heart Irish Brown Bread

As I mentioned in the previous Fandom Friday, I’ve been on a quest to find easy, no-to-low yeast bread recipes. In the no-yeast category, I found a couple of Irish Soda Bread recipes that were close, but not quite, to what I wanted (yeah, me, the inexperienced baker, critiquing recipes – I’m such a brat!). My solution was to merge them together and create my own.

The two recipes (I highly recommend checking out both, because they are super cool) are – Mummy’s Brown Irish Soda Bread from Darina Allen, and Irish Soda Bready from Lauren Braun Costello. This is my version –

• Two cups whole wheat flour
• Two cups all purpose flour
• One teaspoon salt
• One teaspoon baking soda
• Two heaping tablespoons wheat germ
• Two heaping tablespoons rolled oats
• Two cups buttermilk substitute (two cups whole milk, two tablespoons lemon juice, let sit ten minutes)
• Two tablespoons coconut oil
• One egg

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix the dry ingredients together, then make a well in the center. Blend the wet ingredient together, then pour into the well. Mix together just until everything is incorporated. Turn out onto a lightly floured cookie sheet (I put parchment paper on the cookie sheet first – seriously, why didn’t anyone ever tell me how awesome parchment paper is in the kitchen?), shape the dough into a flour-covered ovalish circley type thing, then cut a cross on the top. I especially love how Darina‘s recipe describes this – she says, “Cut a deep cross into the bread (this is called ‘blessing the bread’ and then prick it in the center of the four sections to let the fairies out of the bread).” Pop it into the oven for 45 minutes, then cool on a wire rack.

This is what one of my early loaves looked like –

The general opinion in the house – the eldest loved it, the other two thought it was okay, and hubby downright disliked it (“Way too bland, dry, and salty” I believe he said).

Time passed, and I continued to play around with the recipe. I substituted one cup of all purpose flour for one cup of smelt flour. I stopped dusting the bread with flour, and had a brief flirtation with rolling it in oats. I discovered Kate’s Buttermilk, and it’s the perfect size for two loaves.

Then after I found the aforementioned Peasant Bread recipe, we took a short break from the brown bread. When I revisited it, I decided to tweak the recipe once again to see if it would appeal to the rest of the family.

This time, I added a half cup of sugar. Yeah, wicked sweet. I should’ve known better, but I’d seen other versions call for that amount. Next loaf I cut it to a quarter cup, and that seemed to be the perfect amount to balance the saltiness.

So to recap, in my current version the ingredients are –

• Two cups whole wheat flour
• One cup all purpose flour
• One cup smelt flour
• One quarter cup sugar
• One teaspoon salt
• One teaspoon baking soda
• Two heaping tablespoons wheat germ
• Two heaping tablespoons rolled oats
• Two cups buttermilk
• Two tablespoons coconut oil
• One egg

I plan to make a few loaves over the next few weeks, so I’ll keep you posted if I add any more tweaks. Do any of my baking friends have a favorite brown bread recipe? Or any kind of no-to-low yeast bread recipe? Please shout out in the comments – I’d love to try them!