Open Access at Windsor Dairy

In a recent post exploring raw milk, I concluded that because the alleged benefits and safety of raw milk are directly dependent on the living and cleanliness standards of each dairy, one could not safely drink raw milk without seeing first hand the dairy from which the milk is purchased.

This gives me a good reason for a field trip. Bonus - my son is currently going through the obligatory animal obsession phase, so he will probably enjoy it too.

Windsor Dairy is the best known dairy in this area offering raw milk shares*, and conveniently, they also feel pretty strongly that consumers should check out their cows. They require every prospective milk share purchaser to tour the dairy on one of their two weekly tours. So we went, the whole family in tow.

I had no idea what to expect. Having spent my whole life in the suburbs, I'm not even sure that milk comes from cows; I've never seen a live chicken, and I've certainly never seen a baby goat lying asleep with his head nuzzled in the crook of his front leg.

I think I was expecting a big field filled with cows next to an industrial-style milking building, but what I saw was completely surprising.

The farm was like a cross between a petting zoo and a bustling animal city: a city with a downtown (the farmhouse, the shop, the milking building, the chicken coops, the "maternity ward" for young cows and goats and their mothers), a diverse population (cows, chickens, goats, a dog, a horse and a few sheep), rush hour (free range chickens EVERYWHERE), and the burbs (200 acres of pasture just starting to green up).

I was stunned at the perfect balance of manic activity with the easy, timeless pace of nature. The frantic pace of the chickens. (they are so weird that they deserve a post of their own). The heart wrenching cuteness of the kids bumping into each other for access to the trough of hay. The black lab chasing terrified chickens. And all the while, the cows just hanging out watching everything, lazily chewing, chewing, chewing their cud.

In the coming weeks, I'll do a few more posts, one on chickens, just because they're so fun, and the other on the point of my visit - the cows. But before getting into detail, I'll say that the whole place was wonderful, interesting, natural, clean and totally open. It was much more than I'd been hoping to see.

One final note - one of the chicken coops has apparently been taken over by a very exclusive club. See the rules below...



*Colorado is one of many states that prohibits the sale of raw milk. To get around this, raw milk dairies sell shares of cows ... you buy part of a cow for a one-time fee, and then pay a monthly boarding and milking fee to get your milk.

Why Pay for Muesli

I'm a sucker for grains, any kind - fresh baked bread, whole wheat pasta, sprouted wheat bagels, oatmeal cookies... and one of the foods I particularly love is muesli. I never miss breakfast, and nothing starts the day better than a nice mix of rolled oats, wheat germ and some dried fruits, drenched in thirst quenching whole milk. A bowl of muesli can't be beat for good taste and filling you up.

But there are a few things that bug me about buying pre-made muesli: it always seems overpriced, it never has exactly what I want, and it's usually too sweet.

Overpriced - $5-$6 per pound (approximately) seems like too much to pay for the amount that I go through. I know it has dried fruit in it, which is expensive, but it's mostly just rolled oats, which aren't expensive.

What do I want? - Not sunflower seeds. Blech. There aren't too many foods I dislike, but that is one of them. Ideally, I'd like a muesli with lots of fruit and a mixture of grains and seeds to make it more interesting and nutritionally diverse than just rolled oats and raisins.

Given these complaints, I decided I should just make my own. After all, it's just mixed up dried ingredients. What could go wrong? Well, for once, nothing actually. It had exactly what I wanted, and I mixed it up in about 2 minutes. As a bonus, my son liked it too, expanding his repertoire of wheetabix, yogurt and berries to include one more item.

I didn't include a picture here because it looks exactly as it sounds - like a bowl of rolled oats, dried fruit and a few other extras. My photography isn't good enough to make that look any better than a pile of stuff. But it did taste pretty good, so you might want to give it a try.

What was in the cupboard Muesli

• 1 c. rolled oats
• 1/2 c. rolled rye flakes
• 1/4 c. wheat germ
• 2 Tbs. wheat bran
• 1 Tbs. brown sugar
• 1/4 c. raisins, roughly chopped (if I don't chop them, my son picks them out and eats nothing else)
  
• 10 dried apricots, sliced thin, then chopped (see raisins)
• 1/4 c. pecans, roughly chopped
• 2 Tbs. unsweetened coconut flakes
• 1 Tbs. flax seeds

St. Paddy's Stripy Cat

As a little preview for St. Patrick's day and for my first time participating in Bread Baking Day, I've decided to make a sweet variation of Irish soda bread. Thanks to Mansi of the Fun and Food Blog for hosting this most appropriate event of making quick breads in the month of St. Patrick's Day!

The recipe comes from Darina Allen's Ballymaloe Cookery Course. Darina Allen runs a cookery school in Ireland. She is a leader in the movement towards eating local, organic cuisine and has been for a lot longer than it has been in fashion.

Simply put, I cannot say enough good things about this cookbook. It seems to be on the shelf in every house I visit in Ireland (about 6), but I have never considered buying it. I have a lot of cookbooks and having skimmed through it, I decided that it was too similar to the Joy of Cooking in its encyclopedic coverage of every topic under the sun. Having lugged home too many cookbooks in my suitcase, I was also put off by its massive bulk. But it couldn't be avoided - we were given it as a gift this last Christmas.

And boy am I glad - in a few short months it has become one of two (Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food is the other) that I turn to almost daily. What's so great about it?

Ms. Allen is a passionate advocate for eating locally and seasonally, which is reflected in most of the recipes. The recipes generally group foods from the same season, which means that I can easily find a recipe to match whatever happens to be in my cupboard.

The sheer number of recipes at first seems like overkill, and I thought it would be hard to choose between recipes. For a reasons I can't understand, the number of recipes seems exactly right - for example, there are 13 recipes for preparing cauliflower, one to fit every mood.

So enough about my cookbook - what is Stripy Cat? It's a variation of Spotted Dog, which is a variation of Irish Soda Bread. Soda bread is a traditional Irish white flour bread, leavened with baking soda and buttermilk. It's a crunchy, rustic, tender, flavorful loaf, a little lighter than the delicious Irish Brown Bread, about which you already know I have passionate feelings.

Spotted Dog is a slightly sweeter version of soda bread, containing an egg, a little sugar and raisins, mmm. Good, but I was looking for something a little richer, and apparently so were they....

Stripy Cat is Spotted Dog but with dark chocolate chunks instead of raisins - even better!

We've made it before, but it wasn't quite what we were looking for ... today we added about 50% more chocolate, a handful of nuts, and a few more teaspoons of sugar. It turned out exactly as we hoped. Rich, crunchy, moist, chocolaty, but not too sweet.

Here is the recipe, with my variations.

In a few of my past bread posts, I've discussed the necessity to reduce flour if you're in Colorado. I do not find that to be the case with soda leavened breads. A friend of mine in New York who experimented with Brown Bread after my first post found that she had to reduce the liquid in order to get the same texture. The takeaway from this is that you should cut in the liquid slowly and stop when the dough seems only just moistened but picks up all the flour.

Stripy Cat

• 450 g (1 lb) plain (or all-purpose) unbleached flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 Tbs sugar
• 120g (4 1/2 oz) best quality, bittersweet dark chocolate, chopped roughly
• 1 handful walnuts, chopped
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten
  
• 350ml (12 fl oz) buttermilk
  

Preheat the oven to 425⁰, with a baking stone if you have one.

Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Mix well by lifting everything with your hands repeatedly to aerate the flour.

Mix the egg and buttermilk in a small bowl. Pour half of them over the dry ingredients and use a spatula to gently cut them in. Pour the rest of the milk mixture over the dough bit by bit, cutting it in - be sure not to overmix or add to much liquid.

The dough will be very thick and sticky and have lumps of unincorporated flour. Pat the dough into a rough ball and then drop it on a cookie sheet or pizza paddle. Flatten the ball a little into a loaf, and then cut in a deep X.

Cook on the sheet or stone at 425⁰ for 10 minutes, then lower the heat to 400⁰ and cook for 35 minutes more. The finished bread will look golden and sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.

This recipe is a basic summary of instructions - my older post on Irish Brown Bread gives helpful tips which I didn't want to repeat here. Also, if you haven't tried this bread - you're missing out. But that's not the topic for today...

This rich, buttery, crunchy bread is a nice contemporary twist on a great traditional Irish bread. Happy St. Patrick's Day!!

Colorado Sourdough from Scratch

Today was attempt #2 at using my sourdough starter to actually make bread. As much as I love tending to it and seeing it grow, I'm not looking for a new pet - it's time to put it to use.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was trying that very day to make my first ever sourdough bread. Many, many hours later, my "boules" were about as risen and tender as slightly misshapen softballs. Yumm. I decided not to waste the electricity to bake them - there was no hope.

What went wrong?

The recipe I used was suggested as the easiest one to start with for new sourdough bakers in the King Arthur book -

Pain Au Levain with Whole Wheat.

• 1 c. (9 oz) ripe whole wheat levain - yes, I have that finally!!
• 1-2/3 c. (6-5/8 oz) whole wheat flour
• 2-2/3 c. (11-1/4 oz) unbleached bread flour
• 1-1/2 c. (12-oz) cool water
• 1 Tbs honey
• 2 tsp salt
  

I am not going to recount all of the steps in detail here as the recipe is actually FIVE pages long with a few extra sidebars on other pages. If anyone is interested, let me know, and I can provide more detail.

Actually the recipe wasn't hard - easy steps with short risings in between, followed by one long rising. So I was surprised that my dough was so leaden.

After thinking back on each step in the process, I had an idea for what the problem might be. This recipe is a little unlike other yeast recipes I've used in that it suggests that you add all of the flour and water to your rising agent in the first step, stir it slowly and then let it sit for 20 minutes. This step is called an autolyse and is apparently quite important.

Heartland Mill, supplier of organic grain products, says, "This pre-hydration allows for better links between gluten and starches and results in shorter mix times and improved dough extensibility. Loaves made with autolysed dough will be easier to shape and will have more volume and better crumb structure."

In other recipes I've used, which don't happen to have this step, when the flour is added to the liquid, you only start with about two thirds of it. The remaining flour is added during the kneading process so that you can judge whether or not it is necessary.

Well, being a bit baffled by the autolyse step, I thought I'd better just follow the instructions and added all of the flour.

And this, I think, was the problem. Colorado is extremely dry, which makes the flour here extremely dry. The drier your flour, the more liquid it will need. When making bread, your liquid amount is predetermined, so all you can do to get the right balance is use less flour. When I make yeast bread, I typically add about 1/2 to 1 c. less flour than suggested for a two loaf recipe.

Rather than pay attention to this previously observed pattern, I just dumped in all of the flour. As soon as I began the first kneading step, I sensed a problem.

Whole wheat bread dough is extremely wet and sticky to knead, which is quite different than white bread dough. After a good kneading period and the right amount of flour, a white bread dough will feel smooth, warm and elastic - maybe a little tacky, but definitely not sticky. Whole wheat dough will feel elastic, but it will be much more sticky. If you add enough flour to whole wheat dough to make it smooth, the dough will be so heavy that the yeast won't be strong enough to make it rise.

And that was my problem... my dough felt exactly like white bread dough.

So today I started over, which brings us to the present...

Man, this bread takes a long time to make. I am not kidding, here are (roughly) the steps:

• Mix the starter, water and flour slowly.
  
• Let rest for 20 minutes
• Add salt and honey, knead for a few minutes
• Let rise for 45 minutes
• Put dough on floured surface, spread into a rectangle, fold up like a letter, twice, put back in bowl.
• Let rise for 45 minutes
• Repeat folding step
• Rise for, surprise, surprise, 45 minutes
• Turn onto surface, divide in two, draw up edges and pinch together
• Let rest for 20 minutes
• Shape into boules (long, long explanation here which I don't really understand, basically I ... shaped them into taught rounds)
• Put into bowls or baskets lined with heavily (didn't do it heavily enough!) floured, smooth tea towels and cover
• Let rise for 2 to 2-1/2 hours
• During rise, preheat oven to 450⁰ for half hour with baking stone on middle rack and iron skillet on bottom rack
• Bake loaves on stone for 10 minutes at 450⁰, then 20-30 minutes at 425⁰. When putting loaves in the oven, put 1/2 c. water into iron skillet to create steam, which makes the crust crispy.
  

The only modification I made was to hold back about 3 oz of the bread flour from the first step. As it turns out, I never needed to add it back. The dough seemed to fit the description pretty well from thereon out.

How did it turn out? ... It was everything I hoped for: chewy, tender, crusty, and with the extra flavor of a whole wheat loaf.

So ... living in a town with great artisan bread available, was it worth it all the effort? It tasted quite similar to expensive breads I've bought. The one extra characteristic I noticed was that it tasted fresher. I don't know why, given that any bakery bread I'd buy around here would have been baked that morning, but my husband and I both agreed that it definitely tasted fresher. And it's pretty cool that I made the whole thing using flour, water, honey and salt.

Notice that in the picture, the loaf is half eaten. That picture was taken about 3 minutes after we cut into the first loaf. That might give you an idea of how it tasted. So at this point, I'm thinking I'll keep my little pet around for awhile.

Veggie Laden Mac And Cheese

Middle of February. Ughh. I'm sick of winter, and I'm sick of trying to think of what to cook for dinner, night after night after night. I was driving home from work this afternoon, trying to think of what I could possibly cook - picturing the bare cupboards. Something easy, something comforting. How about homemade macaroni and cheese? That sounded ok, I wondered if I had anything else to go with it.

About forty five minutes later (we're slow, it is really a simple meal), my husband and I had scrounged every fresh thing in our fridge, and a few other things to create a delicious, easy, mid-winter dinner, made mostly with local ingredients. Given that it can be so hard to think of easy mid-week meals to plan, especially this time of year, I thought I'd share it with the masses.

Keep in mind that this meal was assembled from every scrap I had in the fridge. Better to improvise with what you have than go out and buy every ingredient on this list.

You may notice that I am vague on the quantities of flour and milk needed in the cheese sauce. A white (or bechamel) sauce is a basic French sauce used as a base to create many other sauces, in this case we add cheese to make a cheese sauce. White sauce is easier to make properly if you pay attention to how it looks rather than rely on exact quantities. The amount of butter you start with is the main determinant for how much flour and milk you'll need, and therefore how much sauce you'll have.

Also, segmenting an orange takes a few minutes and is a bit OTT. I love the tender, elegant looking wedges that result, but if you want to save time, just peel and separate the orange.

Veggie Laden Mac and Cheese and Winter Side Salad (serves 2-4)

Salad

• 1 handful walnuts


• 1 orange


• 5-6 d'Avignon radishes with greens


• 3-4 handfuls spinach

Salad Dressing

• 1 tsp. agave nectar or honey


• 1 Tbs. white wine vinegar


• soy sauce


• 2 Tbs. olive oil


• sesame oil

Toast the walnuts in a pan on medium low heat until darkened and nutty :) smelling, about 3 minutes. Set aside.

Remove the radish tops, separating the leaves from the stems. Discard the stems. Wash the leaves and the spinach in cool water and then dry. Slice the radishes.

Segment the orange as follows: using a sharp knife, cut enough peel from each end to expose a flat circle of flesh about 2 inches in diameter. Set the orange on one end. Starting at the edge of the top circle, cut down to the bottom circle to remove a strip of skin, going just deep enough to completely remove the skin and pith and expose a stripe of flesh. Continue in adjacent stripes until all of the skin and pith is removed. With the orange on it's side, gently cut just inside the outer membrane of one segment to the center of the orange, then cut inside the membrane on the other side of the same segment to release a tender wedge of just orange flesh with membrane, pith and skin removed. Repeat for all segments.

Make the dressing by whisking the agave nectar with the white wine vinegar. Add in a few splashes of soy sauce. Continue whisking while slowly drizzling in the olive oil. To finish, add a few splashes of sesame oil. Be sure to check that you like the sweet to vinegar to oil ratio, adding in more of whatever is needed to suit your taste.

Toss the greens in just enough dressing to coat them lightly. Pour the remaining dressing over the nuts, orange segments and radishes, then place these on top of the greens.

Macaroni and Cheese

• 3/4 lb. whole wheat rigatone or similar pasta


• 1 small bunch chard, stems removed and discarded, leaves sliced about 1/2 in. wide
  


• 2 Egyptian bunching onions (substitute 3 scallions or spring onions), sliced thinly, both white and green parts


• 1 Tbs. olive oil


• 3 Tbs butter


• flour ~ 1/4 c.


• whole milk ~ 1-2 c.


• Cheddar cheese, 3 handfuls grated


• salt and pepper to taste

Put on a large pot of salted water to boil. Don't start making the sauce until the water has started to boil.

In a medium saucepan, melt the butter on medium low heat. Sprinkle a tablespoon of flour into the butter and then beat with a wooden spoon to remove the lumps. Continue adding more flour until the mixture looks like a dry paste - it will actually start to ball up a little.

Now is a good time to start the pasta and the chard. To cook the chard, heat the olive oil in a medium saute pan over medium low heat. Throw in the chard. You can let it cook the entire time you're cooking the pasta, just toss it in the pan periodically. It will get a little crispy and chewy.

Back to the sauce - add one small ladle full of milk and mix with the spoon until absorbed. Start by slowly moving the mixture around with the spoon, increasing speed as the milk starts to absorb. Continue adding the milk, one ladle at a time, stirring (almost beating, your arm will be tired) until the sauce is runny, about the consistency of melted chocolate. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Cook the sauce gently on medium low heat for a few minutes to remove the floury taste.

Remove from the heat and stir in the cheese.

Remove the chard from the heat and stir in the onions, just to wilt them a bit. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Drain the pasta, reserving about a cup of the cooking water.

Stir the pasta and sauce together in a bowl, holding a bit of one or the other back if it seems that the ratio isn't right (you can't remove excess pasta or sauce once you mix them together, but you can add them in if you don't have enough). Add a little of the cooking water to loosen up the mixture if it seems too thick. Finish by stirring in the chard and onions, check the seasoning and serve!

Sprouting Wheat Berries

I realized in rereading my posts that I've been exploring mostly animal products - dairy, meat and eggs. Ironically, these aren't that large a part of my diet - I've just been on a recent kick of using up milk and finding pastured eggs.

My diet consists much more of vegetables and grains than animal products, so I thought I should start a new project related to one of these...

One of the few processed, non-local foods I buy is Alvarado St Bakery Sprouted Wheat Bagels. Why do I buy non-local bagels? Because they are TO DIE FOR. Soooo sooo good. They are hands down the best bagels I've ever eaten, and I want to learn how to make them.

Double challenge! I've never cooked sprouted wheat anything, and I have no idea how to make bagels.

I decided to divide and conquer, by making something with sprouted wheat before trying the bagels. I settled on a recipe for sprouted wheat sandwich bread in "Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads".

First I obviously have to sprout the wheat, which takes 4-5 days.

Here is my setup. Fill a jar with warm water and 1/4 c. wheat berries. Cover the jar with cheesecloth and a rubber band (or in my case, an old t-shirt poked with a few holes). Drain out the water, lay the jar on it's side in a dark, warm place. Add and drain new warm water twice a day, saving the water to use later on the bread. They are finished when the sprouts are as long as the original seed.

And after one day, my seeds are starting to sprout! Cool. I don't know if I should be this excited - Something in me is wondering if I feel deprived from never having done the seed in a cup science project as a 7 year old.

I don't have a sprout cam, but I will post a few pictures as my little buddies progress.

Easy as Pie?

Mmmmm, pie. I love pie. I am one of those people that craves dessert, pretty much all the time. I usually count down the hours in the day until I have an excuse to eat some sort of dessert. I can't do it too early, or the craving will resurface before I go to bed, which means I'll want another dessert. I have a love/hate relationship with desserts. I love to eat them, but I hate to gain weight, so it's a thin line I walk between the two.

When I think about the desserts I crave the most, the ones the rank the highest are sweet and fatty ... rich chocolate cake, pain au chocolate (dessert disguised as breakfast), and pie. Every kind of pie

Unfortunately, the reality is that most pie lets me down. As I picture the pie I'm going to eat, I think about biting into a buttery, tender, flaky, slightly sweet pastry. But most restaurants and stores don't sell pie this good, at least the crust doesn't measure up. This is when most people turn to their own kitchen, after all what sounds better than homemade pie

Actually, most pie tastes better than mine. I'm not an amazing cook or anything, but most of the time when I bother to bake something at home, it's better than what you can buy out. Perfect example ... chocolate chip cookies (Nestle tollhouse back of the bag recipe). They are delicious, and well, as easy as ... pie. Is that an expression? Because I don't get it. Pie is NOT easy

My pie sucks. Specifically, my pie crust is terrible. I've tried every recipe I can find. I've listened to all kinds of advice.

For a long time, I stuck with the Joy of Cooking's method. After all, six pages of 8 point font (no pictures) explaining how to make pie crust in painstaking detail. Surely if I follow their directions exactly, I can make "A light, flaky crust that shatters at the touch of a fork."¹ That sounds perfect.

Making pie crust seems to be this infuriating contradiction of mix, but don't mix too much. Add ice cold water to a crumbly mix of butter and flour, but don't add too much or you'll make it tough.

I thought I'd try their food processor recipe, which they swear by, to quickly zap all the ingredients without melting them by using my hands.

Strangely, every time I make it, I seem to need almost twice as much water as the recipe says. As mentioned, adding too much water is a big no-no, so I'm always afraid to add more. But when I go to roll the dough out (after carefully refrigerating for an hour, of course), it's basically a big pile of flour and butter. I get it rolled out into a beautiful circle, then the minute I pick it up, it falls apart into, well the big file of flour and butter that it is. This is usually followed by profanity and then tears.

Next, I borrowed The Perfect Pie from my sister, who makes great pie. An entire cookbook completely devoted to pie.

This recipe definitely sounded more promising. Instead of being just flour, butter, salt and water, it had more ingredients. "The egg yolk contains natural lecithin, which helps make the dough easy to handle, and the lemon juice or vinegar slows development of the gluten to ensure a tender crust."² My other crust (pile of crumbs) was definitely tender, but not at all easy to handle. This sounded better.

Although, I will say that this recipe calls for shortening (Crisco), definitely Not Real Food (NRF). I'll use butter instead.

Same results. Big pile of crumbs. Infuriating. My sister was there, she says I definitely need to add more water, whether it seems like too much or not.

Ok, finally, I thought I'd try my favorite, infallible The Art of Simple Food³ by Alice Waters. She can do no wrong, so definitely her pie crust will be great. It was back to the same basic ingredients as the Joy of Cooking, but she says to just mix it up with a fork.

Alright, I'll add enough water for it to stick, mix it gently with a fork, and voila, perfect, tender crust.

I first cut the butter and salt into the flour, until it resembled peas, just as instructed. I made sure my water was ice cold, then gently stirred it in until the dough just started to clump. Then I compressed it into a ball which I refrigerated for an hour.

As I rolled it out between two sheets of parchment paper, it definitely seemed more dough-like. I had a little flash of doubt when I noticed that there were patches of dough that seemed a little wet and sticky, but they passed when I was happily able to lift the dough into the pan without it falling apart. That was a first for me.



This particular pie was pumpkin, my last pumpkin of the season. I prebaked the shell, then put in the filling. When the pie came out, you might say it looked a little rustic. I couldn't wait for it to cool, mmm.

Alas, this story does not have a happy ending. This pie crust ranks down there as one of the worst I've ever made, not an easy feat. The crust was so hard, that when I tried to cut the first bite with the edge of my fork, I had to press so hard that the pie flipped off the plate face down onto my shirt. Note the whipped cream in the photo.

I've never been desperate enough to think this before ... maybe next time I'll see what Martha Stewart has to say.


¹ Rombauer, Irma S., Rombauer Becker, Marion, and Becker, Ethan. The All New All Purpose Joy of Cooking (New York: Scribner, 1997)
² Purdy, Susan G. The Perfect Pie: More than 125 All-Time Favorite Pies and Tarts (New York: Broadway Books, 2000)
³ Waters, Alice. The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution (New York: Clarkson Potter/Publishers, 2007)

Irish Brown Bread - Breakfast of Champions

So now I’ve started a blog. I will confess that I don’t really know what I’m doing. Do I start by gradually explaining my food philosophy in sequential entries? Do I start by talking about my food heroes? Do I start by talking about what I’m cooking right now? I’m sure it doesn’t matter, but for some reason it feels like my first substantive entry should be about something profoundly important.

So here it is… My favorite food: Irish Brown Bread. Specifically, my mother-in-law’s Irish Brown Bread. I swear that this bread is so delicious and feels so wholesome and filling in my belly, that if humans had to pick a single food item on which to survive, I’d definitely recommend this one.

The first time I had it was a few months after I started dating my (now) husband. We went to Ireland for a few days for a wedding. We stopped at his parent’s house where his mother had laid out a quick breakfast of this strange lumpy looking bread, juice and tea. From the first bite, I was blown away. It was crusty and heavy, but moist and delicately flavored. The grains of wheat tasted nutty and complex without being dense or earthy as whole grain breads often are. I couldn’t stop eating it.

I asked him what was this amazing bread, had his mother slaved over it for hours? He said, “What that stuff, you like it?” He’d grown up with it at every meal, day in, day out, for his entire childhood. Then he had a slice and said, “Yea, I guess that is pretty good.”

Now, anyone who’s been to Ireland knows that the bread there is pretty good. Every pub, whether it has a good or terrible menu or no menu at all, serves delicious soup and brown bread. But it just doesn’t match up to hers.

I had to learn how to make this bread. My first strategy was to ask her for the recipe. That didn’t get me very far. She doesn’t follow a recipe. She makes it by feel, and every day, it’s a little bit different. How could I possibly “mix some wholemeal flour with buttermilk until it seems about like this?” And to make matters more complicated, she has unsuccessfully tried making the bread in the US, even bringing her own flour with her. Something in the climate changes the taste and texture. Hmmm…

Second, what on earth is wholemeal flour? It looks just like American whole wheat flour, but there is something different about the taste and texture. Check out this link out to see an example of the confusion over how to find wholemeal flour in the US. King Arthur’s defines it as “a coarsely ground, soft red whole wheat flour” and even sells it.

So my next strategy was to look for a recipe using American ingredients that tasted close. I read through every recipe I could find online or in books, looking for something that sounded close to the taste I remember. After a few attempts, I found an epicurious recipe that is as close as I think I’m ever going to get. It’s not quite as good, but it’ll do. On a recent visit, the master herself proclaimed, in true Irish fashion, that it was better than hers, which is simply not true, but must mean it’s not bad!

So how do you make it? It’s incredibly easy.

It consists primarily of wholemeal flour (as discussed above), leavened by baking soda and quite a bit of buttermilk. The contrast of the buttermilk and the wheat is what gives it the amazing texture and taste. The wheat tastes nutty and crunchy, while the buttermilk tastes moist, velvety and creamy.

I usually use regular whole wheat flour, but once I did use fresh ground whole wheat flour bought at the local farmer’s market. I can’t honestly say that I could taste a difference, but I let it sit around a while before using it, which probably had an effect.

I follow the epicurious recipe pretty closely, but here are a few extra notes.

Sprinkle a pizza paddle or baking sheet generously with cornmeal before starting. Your hands are going to get really messy, so you won’t be able to do this later.

Don’t buy toasted bran and germ, just toast them in a pan for a few minutes until golden and nutty smelling.

Mix all the dry ingredients and the butter together in the bowl as instructed. Then slowly add the buttermilk. This dough should be handled just enough to get the ingredients holding together or it will become tough. I use a large spatula and a folding motion to mix in the liquid and stop well before it’s mixed in. The amount of liquid needed varies. The dough should seem moist and sticky but not oozing, and it will be quite irregular. In the bowl, I use my hands to form the dough into a ball and then transfer it to the paddle, patting it down into a mound. Use a sharp knife to cut a deep X into it. Either bake it on the cookie sheet or better yet, slide it off the paddle onto a baking stone.

This is hard to do, but be sure to let it cool completely before cutting it, or steam will escape causing it to dry out. To serve, cut it into quarters along the X and slice each quarter like a mini loaf.


Finally – what’s the best way to eat it? Smeared in butter and orange marmalade is the traditional way, although open faced sandwiches with cheese and ham make a delicious light lunch. The only real rule is that you have to eat it quickly, as it dries out after a day or so. This hasn’t ever been a problem in our house.