One of the most missed foods from the Emerald Isle for us expats has to be a good ole loaf of Irish brown bread slathered with Kerrygold butter or Ballymaloe relish & some cheddar! Drool!! (btw, recipe for a good Irish style relish coming to my website soon…so go follow me!)

We all have a nana or aunty (called Mary probably)  that  bakes the best loaf that we miss so much!  I have spent quite a while working with Aussie ingredients to get that perfect wholesome loaf that’s super easy to make! I use a stoneground wholegrain plain flour because the normal wholemeal flour here that you get is not the same as the one we have back home.  You will get the stoneground flour in most good health food shops like Flannery’s or you could use the regular supermarket bought flour, but your results just won’t be as good.

Not only is this bread super easy to make, it is super healthy! I bake it often for my aussie friends as a health loaf as it’s so full of fibre and is also yeast free. It’s also the perfect hangover food if you’ve had a few drinks the night before. Trust the Irish to come up with the best hangover cures!

So how did the Irish come to make this amazing bread? In the mid 1700’s wheat was a cheap source of food but because the Irish wheat is a ‘soft’ wheat’, it does not work well with yeast. But once refined, baking soda became available in Ireland and they found the perfect way to bake what we now know today as Irish brown soda bread!

Right, let’s get baking!!

Ingredients for one loaf

  1. 200g Stoneground Wholegrain Wheat Flour
  2. 100g White Bread Flour
  3. 75g Rolled Oats
  4. 75g Wheat Bran
  5. 40g Brown Sugar
  6. 10g Salt
  7. 10g Baking Soda
  8. 60g Vegetable Oil
  9. 500g Buttermilk
  10. 1 Loaf tin (I use Kmarts super heavy gauge loaf pan)

Preheat oven to 180 degrees celsius.

Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl.

Make a well and pour in your oil & buttermilk.

Mix well. Your mix will be a bit like a thick wet porridge.

Grease your tins, I normally use spray oil to give the tin a good grease.

Pour your mixture into the loaf tin and smooth out.

Sprinkle with rolled oats

Bake for 1 hour.

Leave to cool on a wire rack.

I usually bake 2 loaves at once and them slice and freeze it so I can just pull it out and pop it in the toaster when I need some!

Enjoy and hope you all had a wonderful St Patrick’s Day!

Love Lizzy 💚
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