Week 16: Beet and Cheddar Soda Bread

Cooking with Jane, Recipes,

With the weather cooling, we’ve been hankering for fresh baked goods. I love baking bread, but a yeasted bread takes a lot of time and planning, which isn’t always available! So we were pretty excited to come across this recipe for a soda bread – it uses simple ingredients, there’s no rising time, and you also don’t need to pre-cook the beets! This bread is best enjoyed the day it’s baked, but will keep for about 2 days.

It won’t last that long, though.

The beets come through perfectly and contribute their earthy sweetness, the rosemary on top is a nice herbaceous lift, and the cheddar is the perfect salty fat component. DELICIOUS, EASY, and BEAUTIFUL. The Taurus dream. It smelled so good coming out of the oven that it was nearly torture waiting for it to cool. We found ours was a little bit underdone at 30 minutes, so it could be in there longer, but follow your intuition and your knowledge of your own oven’s temperament. Ours is on the cooler side.

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Beet and Cheddar Soda Bread

Slightly adapted from delicious magazine.

Ingredients

  • 3 small beets about 250g, peeled and coarsely grated
  • 500 g all purpose flour plus extra for dusting
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp fine sea salt
  • 360 ml buttermilk we used 1 Tbsp +1 tsp lemon juice in a measuring cup, and topped it up to 360ml with milk
  • 200 g old cheddar crumbled (the original recipe calls for feta, which we didn’t have on hand)
  • Fresh rosemary sprigs to decorate we used some dried sprigs from a previous share

Instructions

  1. Heat the oven to 400. Place the beet in a clean dishtowel (that you don’t mind getting stained!) and squeeze out as much moisture as possible. We kept the juice and drank it mixed in with other fruit juices.

  2. Put the flour, baking soda and salt in a large mixing bowl and stir to combine. Pour in the buttermilk and start to bring the ingredients together using a wooden spoon. When it has almost come together as a dough, tip it out onto a clean surface and start to knead in the grated beet and crumbled cheddar. Once combined, shape the dough into a ball and flatten slightly. The dough will be sticky and hard to get off your fingers, but it's worth it.

  3. Dust a baking sheet with flour. Transfer the loaf to the baking sheet, then stud the outside with rosemary sprigs. Bake for 30 minutes until golden and cooked through. Allow the loaf to cool before slicing.