In search of Irish soda bread worth making more than once a year

Lots of food that started life as food for peasants has become a beloved comfort food staple, things slow-cooked to make the most of inexpensive, readily available ingredients. Take Boeuf Bourguignon for instance. 

But not all peasant food is so pleasant, and I used to lump Irish soda bread in that category. I had no Irish grandmother to make it a cherished staple, and most of the examples someone would bring into work just reinforced in my head that it was a cheap food probably best served warm with butter and otherwise best skipped. Most were second-day efforts and dry and tasteless.

But having been on a quick-bread phase lately, I was moved to give it a try in the name of having a good, fast-ish fix for when I'm too tired/it's too cold to go down the hill to the bakery.

I have no idea if this is in anyway authentic, but I figured that much butter and honey gave it a fighting chance.

Irish soda bread

From Garden Way Publishing’s “Bread Book: A Baker’s Almanac,” by Ellen Foscue Johnson.

Ingredients
3 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
12 tablespoons butter, cut into chunks
2 cups raisins, preferably golden*
1 egg
½ cup honey
1 cup buttermilk

Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 10-inch casserole or skillet with deep sides.

Combine flour, baking powder, soda and salt. Cut in butter with a pastry blender or two knives until you’ve reached the coarse crumb stage. Mix in raisins.

Beat egg until frothy. Mix in honey and combine well. Blend in buttermilk.

Stir wet ingredients into dry using a fork just until a shaggy dough comes together. Transfer to prepared baking dish, soothing the top just a bit. Bake for 1 hour or until golden brown. Remove from pan and serve warm but into wedges.

*If your raisins are a tad on the dried-out side, like mine, a brief soak with 1 tablespoon of Irish whiskey seemed to do the trick.

Rating: Very sustaining, as you would expect for sturdy food. A craggy exterior and moist, crumby interior. Dave thought it nummy. I was initially a little more reserved, but do think it's a better example than most I've been exposed to. Maybe the Jameson splash helped. Realistically, it's the honey. Given the price of honey and butter, this may no longer be the cheapest approach to bread, but it might turn out to be what's in the house bread.

And a follow-up opinion: This actually worked better as a tasty butter delivery device the next day, when one can successfully slice it like a regular loaf and serve it lightly toasted. The flavor and crumbliness had time to settle a bit and it was a perfectly fine breakfast. Maybe this can serve as a decent bail-out bread.

Refried bean soup with chipotle

We went from weeks in the deep freeze to almost civilized temperatures in the space of about a day. Taking it for what it's worth. At least it makes the car easier to start and it's warm enough to get out and walk amid the sidewalk puddles.

But even at 58 degrees warmer for the high compared to the low on Tuesday, it's still soup weather. When you start in double digits below zero, there's lots of room for improvement.

So time to make that pricey Bon Appetit subscription pay for itself.

Spicy pork and refried bean soup

Adapted from Bon Appetit, March 2025. It calls for ground pork, but I went with ground chicken since that's that I had on hand. 

Ingredients

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped 

3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 pound ground pork, turkey or chicken
3 to 5 canned chipotles, chopped, plus 3 tablespoons chipotle liquid
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon ground coriander
1 16-ounce can refried beans
4 cups chicken broth
Sliced radishes, crumbled cojita cheese, fresh cilantro leaves for garnish
Lime wedge for serving.

Method

Heat a large heavy pot. Add olive olive oil, onion and garlic over medium heat. Heat until onion starts to soften. Add ground meat, breaking up with a spoon, and salt, oregano, cumin and coriander. Cook until meat is almost cooked. Add refried beans and broth, breaking up beans to incorporate.

Heat through about 10 minutes. Serve topped with radishes, cojita and cilantro with a lime wedge on the side. Serves 6

Rating: This makes a warm, surprisingly mellow soup. I think it's all the canned refried beans, which resembled nothing so closely as dog food and seem to need robust flavors to compensate for being an otherwise insert mass. Flavorwise, it's Dave-approved. I thought it reasonably pleasant, and am looking forward to seeing if the leftovers reflect a bit more heat. 

Orange quick bread because it's freaking cold

This evening when Dave liberated me from the downtown office, it was 10 degrees, nearly 30 degrees warmer than when he first deposited me there in the morning because the car wisely would not start and it was left to the mighty DaveMobile to come vrooming through since I was on the hook to teach an in-person only class.

How does that relate to orange quick bread? Yesterday, and the two previous days, it was also dangerously cold, too cold for sensible humans to walk down the hill to the bakery to replenish the supply of bread for breakfast. So last night, spurred by the orange zest I had taken off an orange for lunch, the internet came through with a fast solution.

Orange quick bread

This recipe comes from Pastry & Beyond. which focuses on fairly simple scratch baking. Nothing wrong with that.

Ingredients

½ cup butter
 1 ½ cup flour
 2½ teaspoons baking powder
 ½  cup sugar
 2 tablespoons orange zest
 2 eggs
 ¾ cup fresh orange juice

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a bread pan. Line with parchment overhanging by a couple of inches on each side.

Melt butter, set aside.

Combine flour and baking powder in a large bowl.

In a medium bowl, mix sugar and orange zest using your fingers to knead it together. Add butter and mix well. Add eggs and juice and mix well. Add wet ingredient and stir just until combined.

Pour batter into prepared pan and bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. The original recipe suggested 35 to.38 minutes. I found it was more like 50 minutes, so be prepared to allot more time.

Remove from oven and let cool in pan for 20 minutes. Then lift onto a rack to cool completely.

Devour at your leisure.

Rating: Perfectly fine quick bread. Reasonable amount of orange flavor coming through. After cooking it way longer than called for, it had a quite moist texture. Good slicer. Doesn't really need a topping, but I suppose a marmalade would not go amiss. Would make again in any severe cold snap with oranges in the house.

But it could warm up any time. And it's a damn good thing a trainee showed up for the in-person training session, which is the only reason I drug myself in today.

Apricot, almond and coconut scones

 

Happy New Year! 

Every year after Christmas I find myself with leftover bits of baking ingredients that I really only use at Christmas. Depending on which cookies I made from my rotating roster, that could be almond paste, Heath bar bits or sweetened coconut.

This year it's an overly large vat of sweetened coconut, so this recipe lets me get the year off to a good start on one of my resolutions: Use up leftover holiday baking bits before the next baking holiday.

Apricot, almond and coconut scones

From “Farmhouse Weekends” by Melissa Bahen. Having grown up in a farmhouse, I'm not sure exactly what is supposed to be relaxing about meals prepared there, but I get the beguiling allure of the concept that somehow if you escape to a remote rustic location your life will be simpler and you'll magically have more time to cook. I will turn a blind eye to the fact that unless you move there it simply means you have two kitchens to maintain and clean, and how that frees up your time is apparently advanced math. But there are many appealing recipes in the book for when you actually do find time, regardless of kitchen location. (Hers is scenic.)

Ingredients

2 cups flour

⅓ cup sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

5 ounces cold cream cheese, cut into chunks

6 tablespoons cold butter, cut into chunks

½ cup chopped dried apricots

½ cup sweetened coconut flakes

¼ cup sliced almonds, slightly broken up with your fingers

4 tablespoons whole milk, divided

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

¼ teaspoon almond extract

1 tablespoon coarse sugar (I used Demerara)

Toasted sliced almonds and/or toasted coconut for optional garnish

Glaze ingredients

1 ounce cream cheese, softened

1 tablespoon cream cheese, softened

¼ cup powdered sugar

¼ teaspoon almond extract

1 teaspoon whole milk

Method

If baking immediately, preheat oven to 400 degrees. 

Place flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in the work bowl of a food processor. Pulse briefly to combine. Add cream cheese and butter and pulse until the mixture resembles very coarse crumbs.

Turn mixture into a mixing bowl. Stir in ½ cup dried apricots, ½ cup coconut flakes and ¼ cup sliced almonds.

Combine 3 tablespoons milk, egg, vanilla and ¼ teaspoon almond extract in a small bowl. Add to dry ingredients and fold to bring together. You may need to knead it for a turn or two. Turn out onto a lightly floured board or sheet of parchment paper. And pat into a circle about ¾-inch thick. Cut into 8 wedges. If baking immediately, transfer to a parchment-lined baking sheet; I just use the sheet I used to roll out the dough on. Refrigerate pan of scones for 15 minutes.

Make-ahead tip: To bake these scones later, transfer the cut scones to a freezer storage box along with the parchment sheet and freeze until ready to use. Add 5 more minutes to the baking time and back from frozen; do not thaw them first. Best to bake these off within a month.

Brush scones with remaining 1 tablespoon milk and sprinkle with coarse sugar. Bake for 17-20 minutes if fresh, 22-25 minutes if baking from frozen. Check sooner rather than later, since any protruding bits of apricot are likely to pick up color quickly and it’s easy for them to get too dark for optimum appearance.

While scones bake, mix together 1 tablespoon cream cheese, butter, powdered sugar and almond extract. Add milk as needed to make desired glaze consistency. Spread over scones and top with additional toasted almonds and coconut if desired. Note: It’s a small amount, so you may not need a mixer for this glaze, but if you’re operating in a cold kitchen in Minnesota in January, you might be at it awhile, because room temperature does not mean softened.

Rating: Worth waking up to when made in advance. Decent texture. Not sure that I detect the coconut flavor at all, oddly, but any apricot almond baked combo works for me. Also not sure that it absolutely requires the glaze, so if you're pressed for time in your farmhouse retreat, I think you can skip that bit unless you prefer more sweetness.

Now maybe if I had made my life choices differently and could spring for this Two Harbors retreat as a family compound, I would magically slow down time in the kitchen.