Soda Bread

As requested, I've put the recipes for two soda breads onto the recipes page. As suggested, the whisky soda bread could be a nice treat for St Patrick's Day (17th March).

Soda bread, for the uninitiated, is a quick bread, whereby the leavening is achieved through an acid-base reaction (instead of fermentation by yeast). It's useful where fermentation flavours are undesirable, where the dough doesn't have the gluten-originating elasticity to hold bubbles; or where you're in a hurry. The reagents are typically the lactic acid present in buttermilk or yoghurt, and sodium bicarbonate. Buttermilk is the slightly fermented milk left after skimming the cream off; yoghurt is rather further fermented. Sometimes 'plain' milk is used, but acid in the form of lemon juice (citric acid) is added. Alternatively, plain milk and baking powder could be used—baking powder contains both the base (bicarbonate of soda) and the acid (e.g., cream of tartar/potassium bitartrate and sodium aluminium sulphate).

Here endeth the chemistry lesson.