Irish Brown Soda Bread

To celebrate Ireland’s patron saint on the cusp of spring, we turn our efforts, for a few days in mid-March, to baking up our Irish Brown Soda Bread. Ours is a traditional brown soda bread using whole-meal wheat flour and oats that we import from Ireland. It creates a wheaty, flat, round, nubby-textured loaf best eaten in thin slices with rich butter or red fruit preserves or with a slice of Irish smoked salmon and a little dill. Since the actual Irish grains and flours are very difficult t