Eat Arkansas

That food looks & sounds phenomenal - can't wait until I travel out of this country & sample some REAL international cuisine.

I think it's interesting your trip & food comments come within days of the opening of Creegan's Irish Pub in NLR (should be having their grand opening Sat - FINALLY).

Wonderful pictures, Max, and a great food travelogue.

I agree with your assessment of the increasing quality of Irish food and Irish cooking. Things have improved by leaps and bounds in the last decade or so, as the Celtic Tiger phenomenon has taken off and young folks from around the world are flocking to Dublin and its environs.

And I completely agree with your assessment of the traditional brown soda bread: it's not to be beaten.

I suspect the English actually get the blame for the "mooshy" peas served with fish and chips. I think they may have been imported into Ireland from England, though, Lord knows, neither then English nor the Irish have always been as careful as they might be to respect the flavor of the excellent foodstuffs they often have to work with.

I wish I knew the secret of Irish brown bread! I'm a fair to middlin' bread baker, but that is one loaf I have never mastered, ever. There must be something to it beyond what is written in the recipes we commonly find over here.

Belinda, I've tried baking the bread here, too, and can't get the same flavor at all.

Could it be the flour? Or the quality of buttermilk? I'm pretty sure that making soda bread is also like making biscuits--takes a light hand, which I never seem to have when I mix or knead anything.

Re bread: I'm going to experiment on it myself. It comes in many forms. Some crumbly, like pure soda bread, some with the tensile strength that suggested it was also leavened with yeast. There's a James Beard whole wheat recipe I make, which includes honey, that produces something fairly similar to some of the bread we were served. But I think the flour makes a big difference. The type of whole wheat is important. And several versions had crunchy grain kernels in the mix, too, which I particularly liked. A good pastime on a cold winter weekend to noodle with.

All these pictures get me excited about the opening of Cregeens!

Max, I'll be interested in the results of your brown bread experiments.

I may be wildly off-base in thinking this, but I suspect traditional Irish soda bread is made with a coarser grind of wheat than we can get here--more like wheat meal than wheat flour.

I'm also wondering if much of our whole wheat flour in the U.S. is made from hard (winter) wheat, with a high gluten content, whereas Irish soda bread is made with soft (summer) wheat?

Back several decades ago, I had some correspondence with food historian Karen Hess, who told me that the unique flavor of biscuits and other Southern breads has much to do with the fact that winter wheat was historically less common here than the softer variety.

In her view, the flavor of the softer wheat is superior to that of the harder wheat, and when bread made from it is allowed to ferment for a longer period of time than usual (here, I'm talking about yeast-leavened bread and not soda bread), it has a richer flavor than bread made from hard wheat.

If I'm not mistaken, the traditional wheat grown in the British Isles is the softer variety. Though we can buy that kind of flour for biscuits, I'm not sure if any of our whole-wheat flours are made from soft wheat.

Which may affect the taste of something like soda bread made from whole-wheat flour, this side of the Atlantic....

I have the same thought about coarser whole wheat flour. The good news is that the market has expanded dramatically here. Wild Oats had a huge selection of flours the last time I checked and the King Arthur line is now carried in Kroger. King Arthur also is on-line and you can order my mail, quickly, a number of very esoteric baking ingredients. At home, I have Elizabeth David's definitive book on English baking. I'm going to give it a look tonight. Beard on Bread has a soda bread recipe as well and I've rarely been misled by his recipes.

Max, for several years when I had time to do so, I baked bread weekly, using an adaptation of a recipe from Elizabeth David's bread book. Anything she writes is brilliant.

I think I may have reversed winter and summer wheat in my previous posting: am thinking it's winter wheat that tends to be soft and low in gluten, and summer wheat that tends to be high in gluten and hard (esp. durum wheat).

I'm thinking this since I don't believe wheat grows well in the South in summer. It occurred to me some years ago that I never even saw wheat growing anywhere when I was a child. It took trips up north before I saw it in fields, though it must have been grown in winter fields in the South and I simply never noticed it. I do find wheat listed as among the items being sold in estate sales of ancestors of mine in places like Georgia.

Will be interested in your results with soda bread. It's the star of the Irish breakfast table, in my view.

ARK. BLOG: David has a huge treatise on this subject. She says they grow soft wheat on the islands, so that's important. But the wheat flour is also very "branny" it sounds like. I think I have a plan to try. Some soft white flour (Martha White) mixed with the roughest whole wheat I can find. And grain kernels to scatter about if I can find them. And buttermilk, for sure, though she offers advice on soured plain milk, too.

Max, your plan of mixing soft white flour with the roughest grind of whole wheat you can find sounds like a good plan to me, to approximate the way brown bread is made in Ireland. Can't go wrong with Elizabeth David. I have devoured everything I can get my hands on, that she has written about food.

Meanwhile, I've discovered a website dedicated to the preservation of traditional Irish soda bread at http://www.sodabread.us/.

Under the recipe section, the website does confirm that soft wheat flour is the flour traditionally used. For brown soda bread, they recommend mixing the soft white flour with whole wheat flour.

Will be interested to hear how your attempt to bake the real thing turns out.