Hi Peter! I really love your mum’s soda bread recipe, as you might recall, but unfortunately, I am currently staring down the barrel of a possible celiac disease diagnosis 😭 I’m definitely going to spend some quality time experimenting once I know for sure I’m going to have to eliminate gluten, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts about the best way to adapt it for a gluten free flour. My initial plans are to try it as written with the King Arthur measure for measure flour (which is apparently the most neutral tasting gluten free flour readily available) and go from there but if you or any of your followers have any expertise (or other gluten free recipes or tips) you’d like to share, I’d be grateful! Hope you and DD are well. 💙
I'll pass this on to DD for suggestions, and throw it open here for input.
That said, your idea of subbing in King Arthur gluten-free flour sounds like a good one - as you know from making it, this (indeed any) soda bread isn't kneaded to develop gluten, so may well work just fine with a flour that doesn't have it. Let us know what happens.
Here’s one recipe for gluten-free oven soda.
NB, just for terminology reference, when I was growing up in Northern Ireland, “soda bread” never had dried fruit in it. That was (surprise, surprise!) “fruit soda”. Mum didn’t have a name for my soda farl with pickled Jalapeños, which is probably just as well. Though it was too hot for her palate, she did agree that it made an excellent addition to an Ulster Fry...
This is a recipe for gluten-free farl which is based on the EuropeanCuisines original and rather decently says so.
For other readers’ reference, here's Mum’s recipe, with a pic of the oven version.
To my certain knowledge it's been in my family via Mum, Granny, Great-Gran for at least 150 years, and is probably even older than that.
The recipe, that is, not the actual loaf in the photo...
My preferred form of soda bread is farl, quartered griddle bread, which is amazing just with butter - though strawberry (and especially raspberry) jam brings it to a new level. Best accompanied by a glass of cold milk in warm weather, or the never-out-of-place wee cup of tea.
Here’s our photo of farl, an image long overdue for replacement with something better, except that when we make this stuff it tends to get eaten before one of us thinks to say “Uh, camera...?”
(DD, prompted by this, is making some Right Now. Pics later.)
When split fresh off the griddle, or later on when toasted, it can absorb more butter than seems possible, and that’s exactly the way my Dad liked it. He’d have looked at our pic, and at this one from Office Holidays Blog,..
...and said something like “If you can still see the bread through the butter, there’s not enough butter.”
YMMV about that, especially with toast where the butter lurks under the crunchy crust then makes a dive for chin and shirt-front as you bite, but it’s worth trying at least once.
As DD says, “If you can eat a slice of New York pizza and finish with grease-free elbows, you can probably manage soda farl with ‘enough butter.’..”
