#griddle bread

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.

Boxty at The Pancake Project

“Boxty in the griddle, boxty in the pan, if you can’t make boxty, you’ll never get your man”.

This underscores the love my Emerald Isle kin feel for the mighty potato bread, boxty. I’m kind of surprised my Irish grandmother didn’t impart this bit of wisdom on me herself, though I am sure if she lived to see me to marrying age, she would have.

Ahhh, boxty. Yummm, boxty! And, for those of us…

Ok so this recipe is pretty shamelessly stolen from a cooking show on youtube that Steve Albini linked to on his food blog (I fucking know, right? Steve Albini! Food blog! Totally gonna steal some of his vegan/vegetarian recipes and post them here at some point) but from what I can tell, the chef basically tried to replicate some Tibetan bread by stealing a traditional Irish thing called griddle bread. So, seems fair enough for me to steal that shit back. I would link to the video, but I forgot to bookmark it.

Anyway your ingredients are:

1 1/2 Cups of flour (normally I would use grams to measure a solid like a normal person, but this was an American recipe and to be honest it's so simple and proportional it's not worth converting.)

1 cup Water

1 tsp Baking Powder.

For non-Americans: the thing with a recipe like this is that it doesn't actually matter what size cup you use (it took me a long time to figure this out) so long as you use the same cup for every ingredient. It's all about proportions! I used a mug, and it made enough for two batches in  a medium-sized frying pan (oh that's right I forgot to mention, you make this bread in a frying pan. So if any of you don't have ovens, you are in luck! You can still have home-made bread!)

Step 1: mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Nothing fancy, just throw them all together and stir till they're mixed. It's supposed to be pretty thick and gooey, although when I did it in retrospect I would have added a tiny bit more flour.

Step 2: heat a generous amount of oil in a frying pan (butter would be delicious, but would probably start to burn this is a vegan-friendly blog). Pour some dough into the pan and spread it around (how much you use will depend on the size of your cups/frying pan. Like I said, I used a pretty standard mug and a medium sized frying pan, and about half fit in).

Step 3: The only even slightly fancy part: sprinkle a little oil on top of the dough for when you flip it, and then pour a spoonfull or two of water around the sides of the dough. Apparently this helps it cook.

Step 4: Cover the frying pan with whatever you have handy (this is why I used a medium pan, the biggest saucepan lid I have is way too small for the biggest frying pan).  An actual lid would be easiest what with having handles, but if you don't have one, you could use a plate or something. Just be prepared for it to be really frustrating every time you want to check on the bread. Cook on a medium heat for ten minutes. For reference: my electric cooker goes from 1-9 and 7 was too hot; next time I'd go for 5-6. 

Step 5: In theory, flip and cook for a further five minutes. In practice, it cooked way too fast on the first side so I ended up flipping it at about 7.5 minutes and turning down the heat for the other 7.5. Interestingly, the same thing happened on the youtube video, so I don't know who that chef thought he was fooling.