If you want to give the Irish Soda Bread a nice crunch on the outside, pre-heat the oven with an empty cake pan on the lower rack. Let it heat at temperature for 20 minutes.

When the dough is ready, put the cookie sheet with the dough on the top rack and pour a cup of water into the cake pan. Quickly close the door. Steam will form and will give the bread a nice crunch on the outside while keeping the inside soft.

Nope. Actually our Irish Soda Bread recipe doesn’t call for buttermilk. Instead, we use a buttermilk substitute.

If you don’t have buttermilk, or don’t want to buy a whole container for the one cup in this Irish Soda Bread recipe, you can make an easy swap.

Use one cup of milk and add 1 tablespoon of lemon juice.

The acidity of the buttermilk mixes with the baking powder to give the Irish Soda Bread a tender, airy texture. If you use regular milk, it will be really dense.

What’s good too is the baking powder cuts any sour taste from the buttermilk, so you don’t have to worry about that.

Honestly, I never have buttermilk at home. So I always use this milk/lemon juice substitute and the Irish Soda Bread comes out great. So of course, I had to write the recipe this way. Actually, this is the way that my mom makes it, and this is her recipe, so I had to keep it buttermilk-free.

If you do want to use buttermilk in this recipe, substitute it for the milk and lemon juice (so don’t add any lemon juice if you’re using buttermilk).

A true Irish Soda Bread has a cross cut into the top of it. As legend goes, it wards off the Devil and breaking the Irish Soda Bread easily into quarters symbolizes the breaking of the bread that Jesus and his disciples did.

Ireland is very Catholic, and although the Irish didn’t invent Irish Soda Bread, they did make it popular. So calling it a cross instead of an x makes sense.

I don’t cut a cross in mine, mostly because I’m usually serving it to a lot of people at once. So I actually make a crosshatch pattern on top because that’s easier to cut and serve.

Yes and no.

The concept for what we now call Irish Soda Bread was started in the United States by European settlers. They used sodium bicarbonate as a leavening agent instead of yeast.

In Ireland, “bread soda” (which we would call baking soda) was used as a leavening agent to make this. And that’s where the name Irish Soda Bread came from. It’s from the bread soda, or baking soda, that can be used in the recipe — not from actual soda like a soft drink (although you can make no yeast breads using soft drinks).

Just to make matters confusing, we actually use baking powder, not baking soda, in our Irish Soda Bread.

Irish Soda Bread is meant to be a bread side dish or breakfast. It’s not a dessert bread, so it shouldn’t be sweet. It should be more like a biscuit.

Yes, there’s sugar in the recipe, but that’s to help it rise more than sweetening it.

I have had some versions of Irish Soda Bread that’s super sweet, more like a cinnamon raisin bread sans the cinnamon. That’s not how a traditional Irish Soda Bread should taste.

Irish Soda Bread, in my opinion, is best served toasted with a pat of Irish butter. You can also add a little jam or marmalade to it too.

Since it’s a hearty bread, it can hold up to toasting and buttering. It’s not a crumbly dessert bread that will flake under the weight of the toaster.