Irish Cream Soda Bread

[butterscotch]

it's close to impossible to find authentic irish soda bread anywhere, truth be told.

so, i'm guessing you're not the only one whodislikes the real thing.

it's interesting that as disliked as it is outside the irish community, people do at least like the name soda bread. LOL, god knows they slap it on anything.

because well, between that and the sour cream, and all the sugar... it's not even close to the taste of texture of soda bread anymore. you can call it whatever you want, you might like it better than soda bread, but it's something else entirely.

And that's probably why it's the only Irish Soda Bread I really like.

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[Corinna Dunne]

The key to good soda bread is eating it when it's still warm. I particularly like brown soda bread with loads of salty butter melting into it. It is pretty straight forward to make, as long as you use a light hand and don't knead it like other breads.

If you are not going to eat it all on the day it was made, it is best to put the excess into the freezer as it really isn't great the next day. But if you do have some left over, it makes great toast.

[foodiehall]

I've been making Irish soda bread for years using several recipes.  Finished product has always turned out well, no complaints from anyone.  A couple days ago I decided to try a new recipe for soda bread which was featured in the food section of my local newspaper.  The only difference I noticed was that this recipe called for regular milk instead of buttermilk.  OK....so I mixed up the batter, formed the disc-like loaf and baked it---nothing unusual, texture seemed right, looked fine when I took it out of the oven.  At dinner, hub and I bit into pieces of this bread about the same time....and almost simultaneously spit the stuff out into a napkin.  Ugh....I've never tasted bitter bread like that in my life!  It was terrible...and took me a while to get rid of the taste in my mouth.  What could have gone wrong?  I bake often so none of the ingredients were out-of-date.  I reviewed the recipe and can't recall omitting anything.  Possibly the sugar was left out, although I recall washing the measuring cup I would have used for the sugar.....maybe I'm losing my mind?!  Recipe called for the usual ingredients:  flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, shortening/butter, (regular) milk, currants.  Any ideas as to the mystery of the bitter bread?

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After making soda bread so many times and always using buttermilk, as opposed to plain milk, I made the recipe again using buttermilk. The result was only slightly less yucky than before....took one bite, spit it out, and had terrible aftertaste. Not to be defeated by this recipe, I e-mailed the food editor of the local paper and describled my problems with the recipe, which incidentally is from a cookbook put out by none other than Culinary Inst. of America. Sure enough, she wrote back saying others had contacted her with complaints so she called CIA. Turns out there was a misprint in the cookbook....called for twice as much baking soda as was needed....but Assoc. Press had picked this up and printed incorrect recipe in syndicated article. I made the soda bread again using the correct measurements and it was fine; the third time was a charm I guess. But now that the mystery has been solved, I think I'll just stick with my old recipes that worked in the past.