Best Irish Brown Soda Bread Recipe

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One of my recent visits to Ireland brought me to The Cliff House Hotel in Ardmore and, oh my, they do good brown bread there. Luckily, I found the recipe in The Cliff House Hotel Cookbook: Granny McGrath’s Brown Irish Soda Bread.

Some of the ingredients were rather hard to find in the UK (they are more readily available in Ireland) but I did succeed and found what I needed.

The recipe is fantastic. There is no doubt, this is the real deal.

Slice of Irish Brown Soda Bread
Look at that. What a beauty!

Brown Irish Soda Bread Recipe

A beautiful recipe for brown Irish wholemeal soda bread.

Ingredients (for 1 loaf)

  • 350g coarse wholemeal flour
  • 150g fine wholemeal flour
  • 100g wheatgerm
  • 100g porridge oats
  • 100g brown sugar
  • 100g bran
  • 1/4 tbsp salt
  • 3/4 tbsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • 735g buttermilk
Brown Soda Bread Flour Wheatgerm Bran
Brown Soda Bread Ingredients (from top left clockwise): Fine Wholemeal Flour, Coarse Wholemeal Flour, Wheatgerm, Bran

How to make brown bread

  1. Preheat the oven to 170°C
  2. Grease a large baking tin
  3. Thoroughly combine all the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl
  4. Add the buttermilk and beaten eggs
  5. Mix (best to use your hands) to quickly combine all the ingredients. The dough will need only the minimum amount of handling. Kneading the dough is unnecessary and would in fact toughen the bread.
  6. Bake for 60 minutes
  7. Remove the bread from the tin and put back in upside down
  8. Bake for a further 10 minutes
  9. Remove from the tin and cool on a wire rack

Enjoy! I have also got a delicious recipe for a traditional white soda bread if you are looking for a more simplistic soda bread loaf.