Irish Soda Bread

425g pastry flour, weighed then sifted
1 3/4 tsp salt
1 1/8 tsp baking soda
510g buttermilk

(recipe taken from: Stella Parks’ Real Irish Soda Bread)

I love Irish soda bread. It looks like some rustic Game of Thrones type shit. And it tastes yummy and spongy, perfect for soaking up soups and sauces.

Before today, I didn’t have any way of knowing the temperature of my oven. All my eight or nine days prior of baking has been a lot of guesswork, random estimations, gut feelings, and intuition. I liked that. But, today, my oven thermometer arrived in the mail. I took it out of its wrapping and had absolutely no clue how to use it. Here are the things I did with it before looking to Google for help:

1. Pressed the thermometer against the glass of the oven door and wondered how it could stay there without the pressure of my hand.
2. Opened the oven door and tried to close it again, this time with the bottom of the oven thermometer in between. It did not fit.
3. Talked to myself and confused myself further.

Google was a great help. Here’s what Google said to me (and I paraphrase):

“Let the thermometer hang from the area of the rack where you typically bake shit.”

And that is what I did. I found that my oven is sort of batshit. Some background info on my oven:

• It has no temperature markers. It’s got off,  on,  and light me up.
• It does not close on its own. I use a long piece of thin rubber tubing tied to the door handle and to the stovetop rack to keep it closed, and it never fully closes.
• It takes a long ass time for my oven to heat up, and it loses about 15° C or so when I open and close the door.
• Still, it bakes shit. It baked all the following prior to my knowing that I was baking a lot of things at like 150°C, a bit too low for bread.

Anyways, this recipe calls for 232°C, something even after 2 hours (fuck the gas bill) my oven could reach only 200°C. I baked the bread anyway. 67 minutes. A bit too long, purposely as I was trying to compensate for the low temperature, but I don’t think I’ll do that again.

It came out a bit too brown in my opinion, though my partner thought it was bomb. I used pink himalayan salt which affected the coloring of the crumb, as you can see. I think I’m going to just make bread the way I like it, not just as the recipe states. It also spread more than I would have liked. Less buttermilk next time. Or maybe the quality of the buttermilk had an effect. No clue. More experimentation is required.

I miss relying on my intuition, the way the dough feels in my hand, that little timer in my mind that prompts me to check the oven or to turn the oven a bit stronger or lower in fire. I say I miss that as if I were a longtime baker, but still, that first week of discovery was amazing. It awoke something in me, something I didn’t even know was asleep, something I didn’t even know existed. And I love that. I love baking.