Home › The Principles of Cookery › Irish Griddle Cake
Irish Griddle Cake
To every three pounds of flour allow a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda and a little salt. Mix the carbonate of soda with some fresh buttermilk--about three breakfast-cupfuls. Make it into a stiff paste. Roll it until smooth, and turn it upon the griddle often to prevent burning. Time, according to size.
A bare-bones formula for soda bread cooked on a griddle rather than in an oven. Two things in the original need attention before you start: the leavening is far too light for the quantity of flour, and the liquid is too little.
- Scale it downThree pounds of flour is farmhouse quantity, enough for several cakes. For one cake, work with 1 lb (about 3 1/2 cups) of plain flour.
- Fix the soda ratioOne teaspoon of soda to three pounds of flour will barely lift anything. The standard proportion is 1 level teaspoon of baking soda per pound of flour, plus about 1/2 teaspoon salt per pound.
- Buttermilk quantityA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, so three of them is 24 to 30 fl oz. Reckon on 7 to 9 fl oz of buttermilk per pound of flour and add it until the dough just comes together.
- "Stiff paste" is misleadingSoda bread dough should be soft and slightly tacky, not stiff. A dry, firm dough gives a hard, close-grained cake.
- Do not really roll itHandle the dough as little as possible and pat it out to about 3/4 inch thick. Rolling and re-rolling knocks out the gas the soda has already released, and the reaction begins the moment the buttermilk goes in.
- Griddle heatMedium-low, around 350F, on a heavy pan or bakestone, ungreased or very lightly floured. Too hot and the outside sets before the middle cooks.
- Timing and the crossA 3/4-inch cake takes 8 to 12 minutes a side; turn it several times as the original says. Cut the round into four farls before cooking so the pieces cook through and are easy to turn.
- DonenessThe cake should sound hollow when tapped and a skewer should come out clean. Wrap in a cloth as it cools if you want a softer crust.
- YieldOne pound of flour gives a cake serving four to six, best eaten the day it is made.
Griddle-baked soda bread belongs to a period when many Irish country kitchens had an open hearth and a griddle or bakestone but no oven, so the loaf was made flat and turned rather than enclosed and baked. The technique depends on two nineteenth-century commonplaces: bicarbonate of soda, generally said to have spread in domestic use from around the 1840s, which made bread possible without yeast or a long proof, and soured buttermilk left over from butter-making, whose acid sets the soda fizzing. Soft Irish wheat, low in gluten, suited a quick chemically leavened dough better than a yeasted one. The round cut into four -- the farls of Ulster usage -- is the shape that survives in the griddle bread still sold for frying with breakfast.