Oat Soda Bread

Hey guys you've heard me talking about this bread for about a week now.  I fell in love with this simple loaf when I spied it on Heidi Swanson's gorgeous blog, 101cookbooks.com.  The great thing about it is the few ingredients needed and the minimal time required to put it together, pop it in the oven and then enjoy with warm, salted--yes I said salted--butter. I hope you love the taste as much as I did. And go to Heidi's blog. She's truly talented and an amazing food photographer. 

Ingredients:

Butter, to grease pan
2 cups / 7 ounces rolled oats
2 1/4 cups / 10 ounces unbleached all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting (and kneading, if your dough is too wet.)

1 3/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/4 teaspoons fine-grain sea salt
1 3/4 cups buttermilk, plus more if needed, and 2 tablespoons for brushing
Mixed seeds - I used poppy, black sesame seeds, caraway, and roasted unsalted sunflower seeds.

Method

Preheat the oven (and your cast iron loaf pan, if using one) and gather your ingredients.

Grease a 9x5x3 loaf pan. Pyrex, tin, anything will do. You may even do a free-form loaf, shaped as a round, and baked on parchment on a cookie sheet. But note, if you use cast iron, as I am below, make sure you preheat the loaf pan in the oven for at least 20 minutes. Otherwise the bread will not rise.

Line your pan with parchment. You don't have to stuff it in the corners as I have. Just over the long edges will do.

You can purchase oat flour in bulk in stores like Henry's and Sprouts and Whole Rip Off...er...Foods. But it's so easy to make your own. Just make sure you use old fashioned rolled oats, not instant or steel-cut. My personal preference is McCann's, available at Trader Joe's and better supermarkets. Pour the rolled oats in the bowl of a food processor and pulse a few times. 

Once you get a good coarse grind, process continuously for about 2 minutes more until you have a fine powder as you see below.

Weigh out 7 oz and save the remainder in an airtight container, for another use.

 Measure out 10 oz of unbleached all purpose flour.

 Add the baking soda and salt and sift all the ingredients in a large bowl. If you do not have a sifter, or hate your sifter as I do mine, you may use a fine-mesh sieve and keep tapping/shaking it until it's empty.

Make a well in the center and pour in the buttermilk. Now if I were you I'd hold back a bit on the liquid, say, a quarter cup, just to see how wet this dough is for you. You can always add more liquid if it's too dry and, alternately, more flour if it's too wet. But the first time I made this it was so wet I couldn't get my fingers out of it and had to keep adding all-purpose flour, one tablespoon at a time, until I could finally extricate my hands to shape it. 

Mix with a spatula until it all comes together, but do not over mix. You want to work quickly with soda bread because once you add the liquid, the chemical reaction that causes the bread to rise starts, and you want to take advantage of it--otherwise, no rise!  Once it looks fairly crumbly and almost uniform like the photo below, you are ready to work with it.

Drop the dough on a lightly floured surface and knead for about 30 seconds, until no cracks are showing, shaping into a ball or loaf as you go along. If the dough is too wet (as you can see the top of mine is below), add all purpose flour. If it's too dry, add buttermilk, one tablespoonful at a time until it's the right consistency to work with. Don't worry, you'll know.

Using a really handy tool called a bench scraper, gently lift the formed loaf off the counter. If you love to bake breads as I do, you must buy one. They are cheap and indispensable.

Place the dough in your loaf pan and brush the top and edges with buttermilk.

Add the seeds, and make two to three DEEP slashes in the dough, taking care not to cut all the way through the loaf.

Bake in the oven for 20 minutes. Then, working quickly as to not let all the hot air out, open the oven, and move the rack AND the loaf one level up and bake for another 30 minutes. You will need to take the loaf out, rest it on the inside of the open oven door, move the rack up and quickly replace the loaf on it. DO NOT try to move both at the same time. You'd be courting disaster at worst or a good burn at best. Take the loaf out, and let cool for about 10 - 15 minutes in the pan and, using the edges of the parchment paper, remove and place on a wire rack to finish cooling. The bread will be hard and have a hollow sound when you knock on it.

Slice and serve with salted butter. This bread will keep for a couple of days, loosely wrapped in parchment paper. You can also toast the slices in the oven to warm them up. It's great with jam, cream cheese, with soup, etc. This bread is fantastic!! Enjoy. And don't forget to thank Heidi.