The "Soda" Means Baking Soda... Who Knew?

My reasoning for making soda bread was twofold! Reason 1: I'd been wanting to for a while. Reason 2: I had actually made some previously at my family's house but unfortunate events meant I didn't really get to eat it. And by unfortunate events I mean that... um... the dog stole the entire loaf off the counter after everyone went to bed and hid it deep inside the couch, along with several other loaves of bread, where it remained until the couch was disposed of recently. Lessons learned: don't leave bread on the counter at that house; the dog has some kind of weird bread fetish.

Anyway, now that story time is over, I'll tell you all about making soda bread! I once again used an existing recipe as a jumping off point, and that can be found here. I didn't really mess with it much, seeing as baking is much more like a chemistry experiment than regular cooking; if you get the proportions wrong you end up making mustard gas or something... ok... you won't make mustard gas, I made that up, but you will make a mess and you will end up with a disaster.

So let's get to it, shall we? Firstly, I shall list the ingredients for you. They are as follows:

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter (1/4 cup)
• 2 tablespoons caraway seeds, optional
• 1 cup raisins
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 egg
• 1/3 cup (approx.) of bourbon (or any other harder booze)

They look like this:

And eventually end up being extremely delicious.

So, let's begin! First thing you want to do is take the flour, sugar, baking powder, soda, and salt and stir them all together. I guess you can sift them if you're fancy. But you have to ask yourself: Are you truly that fancy? Truly? Stirring with a fork or a whisk does the same thing anyway.

Next, you take the butter out of the refrigerator (yes, you want it cold), cut it up into small pieces, and work it into the dry ingredients until it's a crumbly mess that just barely holds together if you pick it up and squeeze it. You can use a couple of forks, or even a pastry cutter if you want to make yourself feel important, but really the best tools for this each have five fingers attached to them. That's right, use your hands, and don't worry if they end up looking like they should be on the business end of a proton pack, a little hot water will make you look less ghostly.

Now, here's where the fun starts. The recipe I was following says to add the caraway seeds and raisins now. But you know what? I just don't think plain raisins are awesome enough. It's time to awesome them up. So here's what you do: take your cup of raisins (plus a little more, you're going to want to eat some in a minute or two) and toss them in a small saucepan with just enough bourbon (or rum, or whiskey, or brandy, or whatever) to cover them. Put 'em over low or medium-low heat and let 'em soak up that boozey goodness for a few minutes. Drain those raisins. You can keep the raisin-infused booze if you want but let me warn you: holy f*%$ is that some strong hooch!

Now add the raisins and caraway seeds to the flour and butter mixture. Stir those suckers in. In a separate bowl whisk the buttermilk and egg together, then add that mixture to the one with the alcoholic raisins in it. Mix it all up! You can use a spoon but, honestly, I just use one to start. As long as you don't mind your hands getting bread cancer they're still the best tool you've got. And if you don't know what I mean by bread cancer, you will if you try it.

And as an added bonus, you can eat the bread cancer! You know you dun good if you could just eat all the dough and not even bother to bake it. And yes, there is raw egg in there. Yes, it is technically a salmonella risk and blah blah blah food safety blah blah blah. But you know what? I've been eating extra cookie dough and cake and pie batter with raw egg in it my whole life. Never made me sick. So either I'm Superman or it's not really that scary.

Now that I'm done ranting, the dough should look like this:

Sorry, I don't have any pictures of my bread cancer hands. The bread cancer makes it difficult to touch things without making a mess...

Anyway, now you flour a surface (I just used the baking sheet I was going to use in the oven) and knead the dough a few times, then make it into a round loaf, like this:

Slash an X (or cross, if you want, or addition symbol if you're math-y) in the top of the loaf and toss it in a 400 degree Fahrenheit oven for 15 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350 and bake for another 30-35 minutes (the recipe says 15-20 but remember: we added more moisture by re-hydrating the raisins in bourbon).

When it comes out, let it sit for 5-10 minutes, then cut into it and enjoy! Kinda like this:

Just like that, actually. Well... you might want to put some butter on the slice first... And be a little careful, for some reason I ended up with a few of the raisins on the outside basically turning to carbon.

I wasn't entirely happy with the raisin concentration though... I think next time I'll add at least 50% more...

Anyway, enjoy ladies and gentlemen! And always remember: if you're cooking, you're doing science, and since cooking is fun, science must be too! Or something like that...