Irish Soda Bread with Chef Frank

i'm chef frank this is proto cooks and today we're making my mother-in-law's irish soda bread [Music] this recipe for soda bread is actually my mother-in-law's recipe that she got from her mother uh my mother-in-law and father-in-law are both from ireland up mayo up litrum uh and she got this recipe from her mother and uh her mother actually lived in the states it was an american citizen she came over when she was like 18 in the 1920s she stayed in philly she she was a cook she was a domestic so she cooked and she probably left around depression era in the 30s early 30s so the funny thing is she she cooked on more modern equipment when she came to the states and then when she moved back home she was actually baking this in front of a fire or uh you know in a hearth which is like a big open fireplace in in her house rather than having an oven and she would take the dough and put it into a cast iron pot put a lid make sure there was coals underneath it put some coals on top and she basically made a little mini oven like that's what dutch oven comes from but in this case it was probably an irish oven soda bread in general is a genre of bread or a type of bread it's a quick bread quick breads are breads that don't need yeast they get their leavening from baking powder baking soda um and they're meant to be mixed and baked and they're fairly quick you don't have to wait for yeast to rise so when my mother-in-law was in ireland when she was a kid you know world war ii was going on and they had rations so they would bake bread rather than buy the bread they got more for their rations when they got the flour this bread would probably have a little bit of sugar but not a lot and uh it was not mainly a sweet bread it was used for kind of everyday bread with some butter and they'd eat it with their meals this version they made this too but it was more of a sweet bread or a treat you can see soda breads that are brown breads with whole wheat flour with raisins without raisins with caraway seeds without caraway seeds i personally don't like caraway seeds in this i like the raisins and i'm not a fan of cooked raisins i think they have a weird texture to them but in this bread i love them so here's what i have for my mother-in-law's soda bread um all-purpose flour buttermilk eggs shortening sugar salt baking powder and baking soda and raisins before we start making this i want to talk about some of the ingredients first right um buttermilk when my mother-in-law was young they would churn their own butter so they get the heavy cream and they'd churn it right and what comes out of that is the salad butter and then buttermilk and true buttermilk is more like skim milk it's thin right because we've kind of turned all the fat out of it what we use here is a cultured buttermilk so it's regular milk with some some live cultures in it that makes it thick now in ireland they would probably use more like a sour milk that is closer to this buttermilk and texture so at the end of the day if you have buttermilk or you have sour milk or you have the the american style buttermilk use whichever one you want another thing i want to talk about my mother-in-law's recipe is the use of crisco so she uses crisco and margarine um i'm gonna use just straight crisco for this uh but you can do a combination of crisco and margarine uh the margarine is adding a little bit of flavor but it's pretty much just crisco with a little bit of flavor in it my my wife's grandmother or my mother-in-law's mother used to use butter for this um here's the thing crisco is going to give you a product that lasts a little bit longer the flavor is not going to be as strong so i'm just going to use 100 crisco and i'll put the butter on later when i actually eat this so if you want to you could probably split the crisco in half and use some whole butter unsalted butter but for the most part i like the texture that the crisco gives one note here is that my mother-in-law grew up on a working farm like they would grow a lot of their own food she tells us about planting the potatoes so her mother would have their own butter that they made they would have their own eggs from their own chickens and they would have their own buttermilk you know we don't have a farm even though everyone thinks that i have my own farm in my backyard i don't so i had to buy all this stuff so you can just imagine that things were probably tasted a lot better back then because you know they grew a lot of their own stuff one of the first things i want to do is soak my raisins i want them to plump up a little and not be so dry so i'm just going to take some water from the kettle and just cover them and set them aside let them come to room temperature and then we'll strain them out i'm going to mix all the dry ingredients together the sugar i'm going to mix with the wet that goes in with the wet ingredients the sugar just needs to be dissolved a little and i don't want it to be grainy in the finished bread so i consider that one of my wet ingredients so i have my baking powder my baking soda and my salt i'm just going to get a whisk and just kind of blend this together just so that everything's dispersed really well all right that's our dry stuff set that aside next we're going to mix our wet ingredients and this is really simple just a couple of eggs [Music] my sugar and my buttermilk okay whisk that together combine really well and make sure the sugar dissolves make sure you break up those eggs really good too all right next thing i want to do is cut in my um my crisco or my shortening and by cutting in i mean i'm going to take this shortening and i'm just going to get my hands in there there are special tools for this but i find my hands work really good and i think back to when my mother-in-law was doing this they probably have special tools they probably would just using their hands anyway and cutting it is basically uh coating the starch in the flour with a little bit of the fat so i'm looking for the size of peas right i'm not trying to uh get this all warm i'm just trying to break it up so that it's like pea-sized lumps in here good okay and that's what we're looking for just like nice and lumpy the raisins are soaked we're going to strain them out and try and get off all the excess water i usually just give them a shake um i don't really want these to be wet going in there i don't need a ton of moisture in this it's time to assemble one thing i want to make sure you have before you assemble is i usually use a piece of parchment paper on a sheet tray you can use a grease tray too for this if you want to just put some crisco down or some fat down i just like the parchment paper it's easy cleanup so we're going to assemble the first thing i want to do is make sure i get all the excess moisture off of my raisins give it another shake or two get all the water off and i throw my raisins in i don't want to throw these in while they're hot if the raisins are still hot let them cool because for the most part we don't want the raisins melting the fat and the shortening i give these a quick toss so they get coated in a little bit of the flour this will make the raisins kind of suspend in the bread rather than just all falling down okay give it a toss so my raisins are coated really well and then i'm just going to put my liquid in get a rubber scraper scrape that off and i'm just going to toss this lightly i don't want to need this this isn't a bread that you want to need you want this just to come together okay i have my rubber spatula but i also have my uh my bowl scraper um and i've talked about these in other videos where i bake but this bowl scraper is probably like a dollar and it's one of the best things you can use for when you're making doughs right and i'm just going to kind of fold this over again i don't want to mix this really well i want to just mix it so that it comes together alright so once it comes together again i didn't mix it all that well i'm just going to form it into a nice big ball right make sure i get everything out of my bowl give it a nice little plunk down here right i'm gonna get a little bit of flour just on my hands so that it's not sticky and i'm gonna form this into a loaf it's a little messy okay i'm going to form it into kind of a tall loaf this will flatten out and a little bit of flour on top like as a dusting is kind of the way my mother-in-law does it i'm just going to form it into kind of a fat loaf again you notice i didn't mix it a lot right i'm gonna put a little bit of that flour on top just to give it a little dust so before i bake it i'm gonna put a cross in the top of this now the crust lets the bread actually open up it gives a little relief so it doesn't crack this will let the bread open without cracking this goes into a preheated oven i have it at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes to an hour i'm looking for a nice golden brown a slightly hollow feel when i tap on it so let's put it in it's been almost exactly 45 minutes and the bread is done i'm going to go get it in a second but i want to talk about home ovens my oven is a convection oven so it uh circulates the air you might have a conventional oven but all home ovens bake at a different rate so you might need to go for a little more time a little less time all depending on your oven what i suggest is getting to know your oven and how it bakes so let's go get the bread [Music] look at that she's beautifully golden brown top and bottom when i tap on her she sounds a little bit hollow i also push down in the middle and what happens is the middle cooks last so i'm always focusing on is it cooked all the way through the middle is it bouncing back a little this needs to cool fully before i slice into it uh or else it gets really crumbly and falls apart so what i'm gonna do is let it cool just like this it's on a tray on the rack and when it's cool we'll slice it taste it and see how we did while i wait for the soda bread to cool i want to show everyone this beautiful cutting board i got from one of my subscribers who's local to my area he makes these at a scrap wood alex thank you so much it's absolutely gorgeous and we're going to cut our soda bread on it this is the first time i'm actually using it the other thing i want to talk about is the type of butter that i'm going to use to slather on this soda bread because i like a lot of butter on my soda bread i'm using kerrygold i'm not sponsored by them but i would love for them to sponsor me uh it's irish butter and it's absolutely delicious uh get the salted one and that's the best butter i feel to put on this bread all right the bread is mostly cool i can't wait any longer i'm a little impatient so let's get this onto my cutting board okay i have a nice serrated knife here because uh it's a very tender bread so the serrations will help us not tear it apart all right here's the moment of truth look at that all right i'm going to cut a slice off now i'm going to put the rest of the loaf over here i mean it's still warm so it's a little crumbly but i'm you know i don't have a lot of patience here [Music] all right cut it get some of my beautiful irish butter and i'm not shy about the butter on this i like lots of butter my wife like cringes whenever i eat this okay look how crumbly it is it's still hot i love it um [Music] it has a little sweetness but it's not super sweet and again i don't really like cooked raisins but in this it really works i hope you try this it's delicious i think my mother-in-law will be happy with it my wife's gonna bring some over later today so we'll see if i get a thumbs up or a thumbs down i still haven't been able to get it as good as hers but i'm getting close maybe i have another 20 years before i get it right um i hope you enjoyed this video if you did give us a thumbs up like subscribe hit the little bell to get notified when we have new videos we have merch in the link down below need salt t-shirts um totes cups mugs crazy stuff like that i want to thank our patrons on patreon uh for supporting us we have an address down below if you ever want to send us anything it's a p.o box and that's it irish soda bread i'm chef frank this is protocooks have a great day

Channel: ProtoCooks with Chef Frank

Views: 25,641

Keywords: #sodabread, #irishsodabread, #irishfood, #quickbread, #stpatricksday, #ireland, #eire, #irishamerican, #kerrygold

Id: GsiQaVHrr0U

Length: 13min 12sec (792 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021