TWD #4 - Irish Soda Bread

To put it plainly, making bread makes me happy. I've made bread every single week since I made the white loaves for the first Tuesdays With Dorie post and it's something I look forward to all week long. Still, I wasn't terribly excited to make the Irish Soda Bread for this week's TWD post, although with only 4 ingredients it couldn't have been easier.

I don't like raisins or dried fruit in general so I left it out and stuck to the original recipe. And I didn't have buttermilk on hand so I used regular milk. It was skim so the dough was a bit thinner than I imagine it would have been if I'd used buttermilk, but it baked up all the same.

This is one of the only mix and bake breads I've ever made.

There's no rise time to develop gluten or flavor and I think it shows. I always have a hard time with slashing my bread. The dough pulls and it's just not pretty. I think I've read somewhere that oiling the knife before you slash can give you a cleaner cut, but I haven't tried it yet. And of course there's always razor blades, but with my clumsiness and tendancy for self-injury I've avoided that as well. I could show you pictures but some of you might be eating.

There's no rise time to develop gluten or flavor and I think it shows. One of the things Jake and I both noticed immediately was the smell of the bread when it was cut. Not pleasant. But once you get past the smell, the taste isn't bad. It's more dense than any of the other breads I've made before, but all in all, not bad.

The recipe says that the bread will turn hard overnight but mine didn't. The bag I stored it in showed moisture in the morning, though. You can find the recipe on the blogs of this week's hosts, Cathy of My Culinary Mission and Carla of Chocolate Moosey and links to all the other bakers' posts at the Tuesdays With Dorie LYL post.