Cookbook Author Cherie Denham Wants to Solve Your Soda Bread Problems (2024)

Plain flour, bicarb of soda, salt, and then your buttermilk. And whenever they made butter, they always used the buttermilk. And during the war my granny sold her butter and buttermilk—just kept some because she did have a family of 13 children to feed—she kept some and sold some as well to make money.

And when Mummy was wee they used to call it “sour milk,” because they called the other normal milk “sweet milk” and they used to drink buttermilk. They loved it. She thought sweet milk was too rich.

They're basically the exact same thing. Whenever I make my plain scones, I use self-raising flour and I add a little bit of baking powder to give a bit of rise. But on the whole it's: Use plain flour for soda breads; and for scones, a lot of the time you do self-raising flour.

Then we have wheaten scones, we have treacle scones—I'm just doing some Guinness scones at the minute—and sometimes you mix between the plain flour and the self-raising flour and the baking powder and bicarbonate of soda. It's crazy. But they're practically the same thing, only bigger.

It's got a good color. It's soft in the middle, but on the outside there should be a nice crust. And when you turn it upside down and tap—same as most breads—it sounds nice and hollow. But a rustic scorched flour finish on the top of it is just so lovely.

And also, when you open it up in the middle, there shouldn't be any wee yellow dots. Because Granny used to blend her sodium bicarb in her hand, and I always sieve mine. But that's so the bicarbonate sort of breaks down. If it's not broken down enough, you'll have wee yellow dots all throughout your bread and that doesn't look nice. And if you hit that wee nugget of bicarb soda, it's like [makes a puckered face].

Yeah, definitely. So what Granny used to do—she always wrapped hers in clean, white, old bed [sheets] and pillowcases. And they were always really, really clean and white as snow. I have got muslins now that I use, and I wrap the soda breads in there after baking, so it steams as it cools, and the crust stays firm. They're soft inside and the crust won't be too hard either, but it doesn't all break up when you slice your bread. It keeps it in slices.

Not adding enough liquid or adding too much. I find that I could use the same brand of flour, but at different times of the year there's different humidity in it. So it really is a case of having a feel for your bread, making a nice soft dough, but not sticky.

Also your oven needs to be piping hot before it goes in. If your oven's not hot enough, it just spreads, so it needs to get that real good burst of heat. You can put a baking sheet onto the top shelf, and get that real hot and then put your dough directly onto your baking sheet. You just need to be very careful that you remember that your baking sheet's hot.

Too much liquid added, or it hasn't been baked enough. It should go on the top shelf of the oven and it should be baked for at least 30-35 minutes.

In the North, we always shape soda bread into a circle, we really well-flour the handle of a wooden spoon, and we go down and across. My aunt Debbie always said that the cross kept the devil out of the house. And I'm sure you've heard this 100 times before, but we always put the knife into each quarter to keep the pixies out of the bread. Because if you let the pixies out then your bread will work, but if you don't the pixies will jinx your bread!

[It’s the] same mixture—plain flour, bicarbonate of soda, salt, and buttermilk. Mix it all together. Then roll it out until it's about a centimeter thick, and about the size of a dinner plate. Then cut it into four, so each quarter is a farl, and that means “quarter” in Ulster Scots, because where we are in Northern Ireland, we're very close to Scotland.

So what I do is I lift my griddle lid up between five and seven minutes. And then I get some flour and I scaip (scatter) the flour over it and it gets a really lovely scorched flour smell. And then I go underneath [the farls] with the bench scraper and just put them on 1-2-3-4, and keep them apart. And you can watch them rise—maybe three to five minutes each side. And if you haven’t got a griddle, just use a frying pan. It does the same job. You just need to keep your heat nice and medium so they don't get too hot. And then you turn the other side over. And then you do each of the edges. Otherwise Granny used to say, “They're not properly done! They've got a damp seam down inside and you don't want that!” My granny was fierce!

You need to do it quite quickly, so it doesn't stick; as you roll it, you need to make sure that there's lots of flour underneath so it doesn't stick. But the softer the dough, the better the bread, without a shadow of a doubt.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Photos by Andrew Montgomery.