White Whole Wheat Brown Soda Bread (Lactose-free Version, Too)

Traditional Irish soda bread is supposed to be just buttermilk, baking soda, salt, and flour (see also here and here for more discussion of traditional Irish soda bread).   According to Joe Pastry, “nobody–not even the Irish–wants to eat the real thing.” Yummy ingredients like butter, sugar, orange rind, and the like are embellishments to make soda bread “acceptable to modern palates,” says Joe.

Well, maybe  . . .

But, I made a recipe that was pretty much just whole wheat flour, buttermilk, baking soda, and salt, and it was quite good. Okay, so I added a pinch of baking powder as insurance that the bread would rise, and I added a spoonful of sweetener. But, it was pretty close to just the basic ingredients.

Pepin’s Tibetan Flatbread, Tweaked

M. has been working his way through all of the recipes in Jacques Pepin’s More Fast Food My Way. He was intrigued by the recipe for Tibetan Flatbread (flip bread), but he found that this recipe for super fast baking powder bread needed some tweaking to work as promised.