Every year around this time I get really motivated to make a really good Irish Soda Bread. To my knowledge, I’m not of any Irish descent, but this time of year, my pinterest board is usually full of tons of recipes for all kinds of St. Patrick’s Day goodies and damn if they don’t sound tasty.

This recipe is one I sort of cobbled together from a few different ones I found last year, chiefly an allrecipes one as well as a Martha Stewart recipe. I can’t say exactly how authentically Irish it is (probably about as close as Lucky Charms, to be honest), but I can say based on some reviews I found on the Martha Stewart recipe, it might actually be better than the Queen of the Domestic Arts’ recipe, which might be about the coolest thing I’ll ever be able to say about anything I ever do, so let me have this, okay?

Anyway, the other key here is that this recipe is easy. Because it’s more of a quickbread rather than a bread bread (slow bread?) there’s no waiting for it to rise, which means you don’t have to plan ahead too much. You just mix the ingredients together and throw it in the oven.

So, without further babbling, here is the recipe.

Easy Soda Bread

Ingredients

• 1 cup of milk (I used skim)
• 2 tablespoons distilled apple cider vinegar (regular vinegar also works)
• 1 and ⅔ cups all-purpose white flour
• ⅓ cup whole wheat flour
• 2 and ½ tablespoons white sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 4 tablespoons salted butter

Directions

• Preheat oven to 375°F
• Mix milk with vinegar and let stand 10 minutes until milk curdles.
• While vinegar and milk are standing, in a separate bowl, mix the salt, flours, baking soda and sugar.
• Using a fork or pastry cutter, cut butter into flour mixture until it resembles a coarse meal.*
• Stir curdled milk into flour butter mixture until incorporated. Mixture will be sticky. Turn out onto floured surface and knead just a few times.
• Drop loaf into a bread pan. Alternatively, you can shape the loaf into a circle and place it on a cookie sheet, but the bread pan method requires a bit less effort 🙂
• Bake at 375° for 35-40 minutes, until top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
• Let sit 5 minutes before removing from pan and then another 10 minutes before slicing. Serve warm with Kerrygold butter.

*If you plan ahead, you can also freeze your butter and grate it into the flour with a cheese grater, but this requires advance planning which my husband assures me most bakers actually do. This sounds fake to me, but okay.

Many other recipes call for adding raisins or caraway seeds, some I would assume are more traditional in this way, but I’m not a fan of raisins, and caraway seeds are another one of those things that require advance planning so they are typically absent from my inclusion in this recipe. However, if you like, and/or have these things, or do that planning ahead thing I’m told happens for some other people, please feel free to add them!