bluire | fragments

Vienna is full of fantastic bakeries the bread here is sublime. But sometimes you crave a little bit of home. Home when it comes to bread is soda bread and brown bread baked in a loaf tin with some treacle but no yeast. Irish breads (the traditional kind) are based on breadsoda and buttermilk as their raising agents. They do not contain eggs (though, I suppose there is nothing to stop you adding one) and they do not contain yeast. The sodabreads of my childhood were firmly set in two camps. My mother’s mother (Gran) made “brown cake” and my father’s mother (Granny) made white soda bread, sweetened with sugar. I can’t recall watching Granny make sodabread, but I often watched and indeed helped Gran make brown cake. She didn’t really have a recipe. White flour, brown flour, wheatgerm, fistfulls of this and that, buttermilk. She made it in one of those classic beige mixing bowls, the kind found in every house in Ireland. She made apple cake too and marmalade and all sorts of delicious roast sunday lunches and a hot meal for us every day we spent with her. She didn’t believe in sweet things, but she believed in good meat, lots of fresh vegetables and plenty of potatoes. She had that classic book, “all in the cooking”, a book I wish I had inherited. It was in her house, but I’m not sure what happened to it. She trained in domestic science before she married and later, when widowed, retrained as a hairdresser, got a mortgage as a single woman (albeit widowed) in 1950s Ireland, bought her house, opened her salon, reared my mother (sent her to boarding school and university) and maintained a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. It’s sort of funny how, taking a classic sodabread recipe and altering it has evoked so many memories of my grandmother. She died in 2005, right before my wedding to S. She was a HUGE part of my life. I loved her. I miss her.

Laura’s Polenta Soda Bread
~ 225 grams plain flour
~ 225 grams polenta
~ 1 level teaspoon of breadsoda/baking soda/bicarbonate of soda/whatever you care to call it
~ 1 level teaspoon of sea salt ground up in a pestle and mortar
~ 1 level teaspoon of paprika
~ 1 level teaspoon of chilli flakes
~ approx 400 mls of buttermilk (do NOT measure out 400 mls of buttermilk and pour it all in, in one go)

Sift flour and breadsoda into a large mixing bowl
Make a well in the middle
Hold buttermilk in your right or left hand
Make a claw with your other hand
Pour some milk into the flour mixture
Claw in a circle until the dough starts to come together
Very slowly in very small measurements keep adding buttermilk until the mixture comes together in sort of a dry ball of dough, it won’t just clump together all in one go, keep clawing until you are sure no more dry ingredients will be absorbed by your ball of dough, then add another small measure of milk. Repeat until you have your dry ball and no loose flour mixture.
Roughly shape into a circle before turning out onto a floured baking sheet
Cut the dough all the way through into a semi circle, repeat so that you have four quarters.
Leave the quarters closely nudged together

raw dough

Bake in the oven for approx 30-45 minutes
At 30-40 minutes turn the bread over, if it isn’t hollow when you knock on it, return it to the oven, checking at 5 minute intervals until it is hollow when knocked.
Open oven door, let bread cool down in oven.

baked bread (the quarters stick together and can be frozen to give easy to defrost portions of bread when you need them).

Cut and eat with chilli soup or just plain. Nigella does a sublime chilli and blackbean and chorizo soup that I think would go well with this bread. Maybe tomorrow I will make that.

Yum.

In a panic about your christmas cake?

Now accepting orders for my luxurious christmas cake.

ingredients: sultanas, raisins, prunes, figs, apricots, mixed peel, glace cherries, (all fruit macerated in an orange zest, juice and congac mix for at least three days prior to baking), brazil nuts, walnuts, brown sugar, flour, butter, eggs.

this cake is made in an 20 centimeter tin and is 9 centimeters deep. It weighs at least 2 kilos.

because it is so heavy, it is not so suitable for shipment. deliveries can be made to areas inside the m50 in south dublin.

price:

luxury cake:
40 euro for an uniced cake.

deluxe cake:
60 euro for an uniced deluxe cake.

the deluxe cake contains twice the fruit and nut quantity of the luxury cake.

last day to order: 19th december 2008.

cakes can be delivered 5 days after ordering. so if you order on dec 19th, it will be delivered on dec 24th.

day deadline for ordering: 1600hrs local (dublin) time.

if you wish to have any ingredient omitted, i.e. a particular fruit or not, please state this in your order. the price remains unchanged.

my right to refuse orders is reserved.  (in case i get too many orders!)

if you would like to order a home made delicious cake, email laura at bluire dot com