Recipe: Soda Bread

Ever since I was fourteen or so I've been a keen baker. I just love the smell of freshly baked bread, or a nice 'biscuit', or any other cake for that matter! When I moved from Belgium to London I was very disappointed by the quality of the bread here. Supermarkets are the worst: their spongy breads just don't do it for me. These days you can get better quality bread at markets but I just can't bear it to pay £3 for a simple loaf of bread when I know you can get the same thing in Belgium for not even half the price! So that's why I started baking bread after having been in London for a couple of years (although I have to admit the baking happens in phases - what with the rushed London lives we live...). A couple of weeks ago I got back into baking bread - and I don't mean the bread-machine variety! There's something immensely satisfying to knead dough with your own hands, get your clothes all dusty with flour, see the dough rise under a clean cloth, and again, smell the freshly baked bread.

One of the problems though is that fresh yeast is pretty hard to find in London (I tried the dried powdered yeast a couple of times, but it doesn't compare to the real stuff). Which is why I started baking soda bread - and for the last few weeks I've been experimenting with variations on the basic recipe below. Recently I started adding the yoghurt because the baking soda works better with an acid agent - some recipes recommend cream of tartar but I prefer yoghurt. Other recipes use buttermilk which has a higher acidity than milk - so there's no need for yoghurt when you use it. I wanted to try the buttermilk variation yesterday, but I didn't manage to find buttermilk in any of the three supermarkets I went to!

Ingredients
170g plain flour
170g wheat flour
200ml milk (half or full-fat)
90g yoghurt
3/4 tsp salt
1 heaped tsp baking soda

Preheat the oven to 200c. Combine the flour, salt and baking soda in a bowl and mix together. Dissolve the yoghurt into the milk, and add to the flour mixture in two or three stages. Mix to a consistent paste and when it sticks together knead for about a minute (not longer than that).

Put on a baking sheet, and make a cross in the dough with a sharp knive (you can cut pretty deep so the loaf will open like a 'flower' when it bakes). Put in the oven for about 30 minutes (the loaf should make a hollow sound when you tap it). Put on a rack and let cool. Eat within 2/3 days.