Irish Soda Bread Gone Wrong

Last month, I made Irish soda bread for the first time. My son was super excited to help out, and he did quite a lot of the mixing (he loves stirring). My grandfather taught me that if I don’t have buttermilk on hand, I can make it using milk and vinegar (or lemon juice). I did just that. The dough was a little more wet than I anticipated, so I just added a little more flour when kneading it briefly, cut the X in the top, and popped it in the oven.

As the Irish soda bread baked, the kitchen started smelling like lovely bread – one of my favorite baking smells. When the timer went off, the Irish soda bread came out looking big and fabulous. It sounded hollow when tapped on the bottom, was a beautiful color, smelled amazing, and by all exterior visual checks had baked perfectly. The recipe I used stated that it needed to cool completely on a rack while wrapped in a slightly damp towel for at least 8 hours.

After the 8 hours were up, I was super excited to cut into the loaf and look inside, not to mention taste this Irish soda bread. I cut the first piece, and was shocked to see what looked like burnt spots inside. I cut further and further into the bread, and kept finding burnt spots in the loaf. Disaster!

My first instinct was to google the answer. Turns out, there were ZERO answers on google as to what could cause this. Lots of “why is my Irish soda bread baked on the outside, raw on the inside” type answers, but nothing about dark brown spots inside the bread.

I have been trying to follow on Instagram a bunch of folks who are more experienced than I am with baking. One of those amazing bakers is @the_bread_babe. In a moment of desperation, I messaged her, figuring she might know, and hoping she’d answer. She did! After seeing pictures, she knew immediately what was going on: the baking soda had not been incorporated evenly into the dough.

Unincorporated baking soda causes over-browning, which looks like “burnt” spots in the bread. This also makes the crust look really brown despite having a thin line of undercooked bread at the bottom. Right, let’s do take two. I chose this time to sift the flour and soda together, to eliminate lumps in the soda. Then I stirred flour/soda combination (for extra insurance) and baked another loaf. I used actual buttermilk this time as well. Again, it was beautiful on the outside. And again there were burn marks (fewer!) on the inside along with a (thinner) line of underdone bread on the bottom.

So, I decided to tackle the recipe again, adding half of the soda to half of the flour, sifting it, then repeating (half and half, sift), to see if that would better incorporate the soda. The frustration level was high at this point. On the upside, I was able to use my new bread lame quite a bit, so that was nice. I was super careful, really deliberate in how I mixed everything together. I popped this new loaf in the oven and crossed my fingers.

So third time was essentially a charm. I still found one or two slightly darker spots along the crust, but I think it was pretty much a success. Maybe next year I will try a different recipe to see if that could make a difference. For now, I’ve reached my Irish soda bread limit. Have you ever experienced the dark spot phenomenon? What are your techniques for preventing them? Let me know in the comments!