Beer and bread have a long and mutually beneficial relationship – before the advent of commercial yeasts, barm, or the froth from the top of the fermenting brew, was commonly used to leaven bread – but beer-flavoured breads are a more recent phenomenon. Though loaves claiming to contain lighter ales can feel like a game of hunt the hop, the rich, assertive flavour of stout makes it hard to miss, and its malty sweetness is a particularly good pairing with moist, brown Irish soda bread.
As Cherie Denham, author of The Irish Bakery, points out: “The Irish like nothing more than a freshly baked loaf and a pint of well-poured Guinness – so this is the perfect combination of our two favourite things.” A further selling point, should one be needed, is that this loaf takes just over an hour from start to finish, and barely five minutes of your time, which is more than it takes to pour a perfect pint, but not that much more. After that, you just need patience, and to remember that the best things come to those who wait.
The flour
This, in my opinion, is the single trickiest thing to get right, at least if you live in mainland Britain. Though you can make very decent soda bread (wheaten or brown, depending on your location) with ordinary wholemeal flour, as Clodagh McKenna, Robin Gill and Kitty and Al Tait’s recipes prove, you’ll get a more interesting texture if you use the coarse or even extra-coarse wholemeal recommended in Denham’s book and by Ireland’s SuperValu supermarket chain. This is standard wheat flour, rather than anything particularly exotic, yet it proves almost impossible to track down.
Denham herself, who shares my frustration, recommends Cotswold Flour’s organic stoneground wholemeal, and I manage to buy some from Shipton Mill, but I wonder about the differing protein contents; Irish wheat is traditionally even softer than our own, and Irish coarse wholemeal seems to come in about 10% protein, as opposed to the 14.2% in the Cotswold flour. More protein is desirable in yeasted breads, where it provides the elasticity necessary for a light, open texture, but less so in more cakey, quick breads, where there’s little in the way of gluten development – lower protein will, I assume, give a more delicate, tender crumb, though I’m going to have to guess, because I can’t get my hands on any! Personally, the coarser the flour, the better, for me, but ordinary wholemeal will work well, too.
I also like breads with a higher proportion of wholemeal to white flour – Gill’s loaf is wonderfully light for a soda bread, but I miss the density I’m used to. Feel free to play around with the ratios if you’d like something lighter; my friend Mike, who grew up a reluctant soda bread eater, is very taken with McKenna’s version (one part wholemeal to half a part plain flour), while the Taits use equal amounts and Gill one part plain to four-fifths part wholemeal.
Everyone adds whole oats to their dough, which helps give the bread a pleasingly rough texture even if you’re using fine flour.
The raising agents
As the name suggests, soda is a quick bread, leavened by the instant reaction between alkaline bicarbonate of soda and acid in the form of buttermilk, rather than the slower action of yeast. Because this is powerful but brief (and thanks also to the aforementioned lack of gluten development), soda breads will never be as light and open as yeasted ones. Some modern recipes, including McKenna’s, include baking powder (bicarbonate of soda plus acidic cream of tartar) to boost the raising process, but given my preference for a more squidgy, solid loaf, I’ve left this out.
The liquid
Buttermilk is a must, but, as with the flour, it’s still not as easy to get hold of actual buttermilk as it ought to be in Britain, given that it’s a by-product of butter making; it seems we wash quite a bit of it down the drain or feed it to animals. The milk cultured specifically for the purpose and that passes for buttermilk in most British supermarkets is unpleasantly sour and thick; real buttermilk, on the other hand, is mildly tangy and thin enough to drink. If you can find only “cultured buttermilk”, I’d advise thinning it down a little with fresh milk if your dough seems too stiff (soda bread dough should be too thick to pour and too runny to knead). But there is great news for UK readers: Longley Farm’s version seems to be increasingly available and Marks & Spencer now stocks a Northern Irish variety.
That’s all you need for a standard soda loaf, but for this iteration, I’m going with the St Patrick’s Day favourite, the Guinness loaf (please note that other stouts are very much available). And if you’re going to use it, you may as well be able to taste the stuff, so I’ve gone with the equal parts of Guinness and buttermilk favoured by Gill and McKenna.
The flavourings
Salt is obviously a must in any bread (sorry, Tuscany), and a little sugar is common in most recipes, presumably to amplify the flavour of the stout. I think black treacle works best with the bitterness of the beer, though if you’re not a fan of its intense, almost burnt sweetness, you may prefer Gill’s mix of honey and treacle, or Denham’s treacle and dark brown sugar.
Both SuperValu and the Taits enrich their doughs with fat; eggs for the supermarket, butter for the father-and-daughter baking duo. Eggs add liquid and fat to the dough, helping to make it springier and, as with the butter, richer. As I intend for this loaf to be served with several centimetres of salted butter, however, I don’t think it’s needed in the dough as well, and my testers and I find the bounciness of the SuperValu loaf less appealing than the soft fluffiness of Denham’s in particular, so I’ve kept mine plain.
The oven
All the recipes I try bake their Guinness soda bread in a tin – usually a loaf one, though SuperValu’s recipe proves that you can also get a good result, and a more traditional round shape, by baking it in a cake tin. The challenge is to cook the loaf through while achieving a robust but not tough crust. Gill’s approach – putting it into a hot oven, then turning down the temperature and, later, finishing it out of the tin – yields the most deliciously crunchy results. This approach is also favoured by SuperValu, which inverts the loaf for the final 15 minutes of baking.
Received wisdom dictates that soda bread doesn’t keep all that well. Like most breads, it’s at its best still warm from the oven, but I’ve found it’s good for several days and toasts well, too.
Perfect Guinness soda bread
Prep 5 min
Cook 1 hr 15 min
Makes 1 loaf
450g wholemeal flour – coarse, ideally
65g plain flour
50g oats, plus extra for dusting
1 tsp fine salt
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda (10g)
2 tbsp black treacle
275ml buttermilk
275ml stout
Heat the oven to 220C (200C fan)/425F/gas 7, and line a 7cm x 23cm x 12cm baking tin with paper (this is easier to do if you scrunch up the paper into a ball first).
Put the flours, oats, salt and bicarb in a large bowl. Whisk together until well combined, making sure you break up any clumps in the bicarb.
Put the treacle in a jug and whisk in a little buttermilk to dissolve – treacle has a tendency to stick to the bottom of the jug, so mix it well – then stir in the rest of the buttermilk and the stout. Pour this mix into the bowl of dry ingredients and stir just to combine, making sure there are no pockets of flour left unmixed.
Quickly tip the dough into the lined tin and smooth the top. Scatter over a few more oats, then bake for 20 minutes. Turn down the oven to 180C (160C fan)/350F/gas 4 and bake for 40 minutes more.
Remove the loaf from the tin and put it back in the oven directly on a rack and bake for another 15 minutes, or until it sounds hollow when tapped.
Remove, transfer to a rack to cool a little, then slice and serve warm with plenty of butter.
Guinness: an unnecessary addition to good plain soda (or wheaten, depending on where you are) or a welcome change? And what else do you like to add to this easiest of loaves?
