With cold weather in full swing and a hot pot of soup or stew on the stove, sometimes there’s nothing better than freshly baked comfort food in the form of a loaf – bread. It goes well on the side of these hot dishes or even on its own.
We love baking a fresh loaf of bread and experimenting with the classics – the feel of the dough, the smell of the kitchen when it’s baking and the light and fluffy doughy goodness is unbeatable. Plus, it’s always a great feeling to smell and taste the result of the elbow grease that goes into kneading a good loaf of bread.
One of our personal favourites at Never Enough Thyme is soda bread where baking soda is used as the rising agent instead of yeast. A basic soda bread simply includes flour, salt and buttermilk where the reaction between the buttermilk and baking soda would form tiny bubbles, giving this bread its distinct look.
But of course, we’ve spiced the traditional bread up a bit and love to make this brown butter soda bread…
Brown butter soda bread
1/4 cup butter
3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup oats
1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp fresh chopped thyme
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
3/4 tsp ground pepper
1 3/4 cups buttermilk
Place butter in hot pan and swirl around gently until it stops foaming, browns and smells nutty. Stir flour, oats, sugar, thyme, baking powder and baking soda and pepper in mixing bowl, add buttermilk and browned butter. Mix with dough hook until combined. Divide the ball in half and shape into two balls.
Flatten the ball into a 6” round and brush with egg white wash, sprinkle with a tablespoon of oats and score an X on top. Bake for approximately 45 minutes. This bread does not need much kneading as no gluten needs to develop.
After you make this, stop by our food shoppe to pair it with some delicious soup at 90 Earl Martin Dr., Unit 4 in Elmira.
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