If you grew up in Ireland you probably think brown bread is something that simply exists, like rain, and that someone else makes it. I thought so until I moved into my first flat on my own and discovered that the brown bread in the shop round the corner cost nearly four euro and was gone in two days. So I asked my mother for her recipe, and she read it to me over the phone from a card that had been in the same tin since 1983.
I have made it almost every week since. It is the bread I take on the hills, sliced thin with butter and cheese, wrapped in a tea towel at the bottom of the rucksack beside the map I never quite know how to fold.
What you need
For one loaf in a 900 g tin, the long kind:
- 300 g coarse wholemeal flour
- 100 g plain white flour
- 30 g pinhead oatmeal, plus a little for the top
- 1 level teaspoon of bread soda, sieved
- 1 teaspoon of fine salt
- 1 tablespoon of black treacle
- 20 g melted butter, plus a little for the tin
- 450 ml buttermilk
That is all. No yeast, no proving, no kneading. The bread soda and the buttermilk do the work between them, and they do it quickly, so have everything ready before the two meet.
Making it
Heat the oven to 200°C, or 180°C with a fan, and butter the tin. In a big bowl, mix the two flours, the oatmeal, the sieved soda and the salt with your hand, lifting it to get some air in.
In a jug, stir the treacle into the warm melted butter until it loosens, then whisk in the buttermilk. Make a well in the flour, pour the liquid in, and mix with a wooden spoon or your hand just until there is no dry flour left. It should be a wet, sticky, porridge-like dough, much looser than you would expect of bread. That is right. Overmixing makes it heavy, so stop the moment it comes together.
Scrape it into the tin, level the top with a wet spoon, and scatter over a little oatmeal. Run a knife down the middle about a centimetre deep, which my mother says lets the fairies out and I say lets it rise evenly. Both may be true.
Bake for forty-five minutes, then turn it out of the tin and put it back in the oven, upside down on the shelf, for another ten. It is done when it sounds hollow when you knock on the bottom. Wrap it in a clean tea towel while it cools on a rack; the towel keeps the crust soft enough to slice thin.
Keeping it
It is best the next day and good for four. On the third day I toast it. On the fourth it makes the finest breadcrumbs you will ever have, and those go into the freezer for crumbles and for frying over soup.
For the walk
Two slices, salted butter right to the edges, a slab of mature cheddar and a smear of chutney. Wrap it before the butter goes hard. By the time you sit down on a flat stone somewhere above the trees, the bread has softened around the cheese, and it is the best sandwich in the county.