Bread Pilgrimage: It’s not as simple as it seems

Different from the process by which we are familiar with bread from bakeries and supermarkets, handmade bread is an important food for Irish-American families and is part of their common experience. As for bread, this food is said to have been born from a mistake made by ancient Egyptian cooks. The lucky chef left the dough in the sun and forgot to take it with him, and the dough fermented. Faced with the fermented dough, the chef was reluctant to throw away the precious ingredients, so he tried to bake the dough. Eventually he got a soft loaf and became the first chef in the world to taste bread.

Pilgrimage to Baking Bread

Irish people usually eat four types of soda bread and five types of scones. In this Gleason's restaurant, "no two soda breads are the same." They are made from completely different bread ingredients to create different tastes for the public to eat.

And one of them, called brown soda bread, has always been the most popular version in Ireland because it is a healthy whole grain. When you travel here, you will see a variety of cafes and bakeries, and a variety of materials. For example: syrup and walnuts, or even seaweed bread. The bread served at this Gleason's restaurant has a very special taste. It is slightly sweet and salty, with a little coriander seeds and a lot of raisins.

Raisin soda bread is rarely known and rarely seen in Ireland. This rare bread is made from coriander seeds and is an ancient bread-making method.

Soda bread first appeared in Ireland around 1840, when baking soda powder had just begun to be introduced. Because the climate in Ireland was extremely unsuitable for the cultivation of durum wheat flour, it was necessary to obtain high-gluten flour suitable for making bread. It’s not easy. After people learned about baking soda, they tried to use it to replace yeast and made soda bread from low-gluten flour. So you can also see that most Irish scones also use baking soda.

There is a reason why buttermilk is included in the ingredients, because buttermilk contains lactic acid, which can react chemically with baking soda to produce small carbon dioxide bubbles to help the bread rise. The Dalmatian is an Irish soda bread. Made from six ingredients: flour, baking soda, buttermilk, salt, dried fruit and sugar to create the speckled effect.

The difference is in the details

The choice of flour is a big difference, because it affects the flavor and texture of the bread. The most famous of these is Macroom's wholemeal semolina in County Cork. This flour mill with an ancient history began producing flour as early as the 1950s. It is an authentic century-old mill.

Air is essential

Making soda bread requires gentle movements. The Irish describe the feeling as "lifting the bread in the air and letting it float back." "In a bowl". Because if you use baking soda, the dough will increase in volume quickly. Therefore, you can obviously feel the air being removed when kneading, and it is as smooth and soft as natural yeast dough. The bread that comes out has a firm texture and a slightly sticky texture, and is very fragrant.

Although the traditional Irish soda bread recipe is not that simple. Flour, salt, baking soda, and buttermilk, put the above four ingredients into a large basin (the bigger the basin, the better, because there will be more air around the basin, which is more conducive to mixing the air into the flour), Take out your palm, let your five fingers stretch out like claws, mix the ingredients into a ball, make a cross and throw it into the oven. However, soda bread turns over faster than a book. If you eat it again after an hour, it will have become dry, hard, and boring. This is truly traditional soda bread.

A slice of soda bread, spread with jam, and a cup of tea, my God, what could be more wonderful than this! (Science Fiction Galaxy Constantine/Text)

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