How to Make Irish Soda Bread

Petra Cox: Hi, I am Petra Cox with Mom's Apple Pie Company in Occoquan, Virginia. We are a family bakery and we make mostly really great pies and breads. We have done it for 25 years but today, I am going to show you how to make a seasonal item Irish soda bread with caraway seeds and raisin. We make this in February and March especially for St. Patrick's Day and it's always a big hit. People want us to make it year around, but we want to keep it special so. I will show you how to make this really great seasonal bread. Let's get started.

So here we have all of our ingredients for our Irish soda bread. We are going to make it with two and a third cups of flour, a third cup of sugar, a tablespoon of caraway, half of a cup of raisins and a teaspoon and a half of baking powder and a half of a teaspoon of baking soda. We have a cup and a quarter of sour cream, a third of a cup of whole milk and we are going to use one egg, we have a little salt, three quarters of a teaspoon of salt So we are going to put that all together to make a really nice Irish soda bread. The thing about Irish soda bread is everybody has their own different idea of what is a traditional Irish soda bread. Some people say it has to have caraway seeds or it has to have raisins or it shouldn't have either one of those. So it's one of those things that a lot of people, their grandparents have made it for them and everybody has their own idea, but we make ours with sour cream versus some of the recipes make with buttermilk and we do the caraway seeds and raisins together in it. It is called soda bread because it uses baking soda to rise the bread rather than yeast, but we use baking powder as well, only difference in that is that it's baking soda with an extra element to help it rise. So we are going to start making our Irish soda bread.