Soda bread for St. Patrick's day--soodaleipä

Happy St. Patrick's day from Cooking Finland!  I decided to make some Irish soda bread to go with the corned beef that I have cooking in my slow cooker.  When I went looking for a recipe, I found this Scottish soda bread recipe in Beatrice Ojakangas' book, Great Whole Grain Breads.  Since we aren't a bit Irish anyway, this recipe will probably be perfect for us!

I started out following the recipe, but made a few modifications as I went along.  The ingredients were:

2 cups whole wheat flour (4.75 dl)
1 cup bread or all purpose flour (2 1/3 dl)
1/2 cup rolled oats
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons melted butter
1 1/2 cups buttermilk (3.5 dl, and you could substitute piima or kefir here)
I also added 2 Tablespoon of sugar which were not in the original recipe.

I liked this recipe because it incorporates so many whole grains.  There are a lot of sweet soda bread recipes available, often with raisins, but the kids often complain about dried fruit in their bread.

Preheat the oven to 375 F (200 C), this dough does not contain yeast, it should be baked right away.

First, I mixed all of the dry ingredients together in the bowl of my stand mixer, then poured in the butter milk and made a very stiff dough that looked like this:

I kneaded the dough a bit longer by hand (Beatrice recommends about a minute--I didn't use a timer, just until it felt smooth and well mixed).  Then I shaped it into a ball, pulling all of the edges toward the bottom of the loaf.  I shaped it upside-down, using oats instead of flour on the work surface, like this:

When you turn the loaf over, it has a nice oat-covered, smooth crust.

I used a sharp knife to cut an X on the top before baking the bread for about 40 minutes, until it sounded hollow when thumped.

Beatrice recommends letting it set for at least 4 hours so it will be easier to cut, that will be just about the time the kids are home from school.  I'll edit this post later and tell you how it was!