Gluten-Free Soda Bread: Spotted Dog (and tips on baking gluten-free)

This Spotted Dog Irish bread is yeast-free and gluten-free.

The Mother of Invention

If I call this new bread an Irish soda bread, traditionalists will snicker. Raisins are not traditional in an Irish soda bread, you see. If a yeast-free soda bread has raisins in it, it's called Spotted Dog. I never knew this, growing up on the white clapboard wilds of the Connecticut shore. I was blithely ignorant of this quaint canine moniker, despite a hefty streak of familial Irish blood. We ate more pierogies than Irish soda bread.

So when I started baking, my Irish soda bread had raisins. Why not?

When it comes to traditions, I admit, I'm an upstart. I wiggle and chafe beneath constraint and "should" like an itchy little girl with pinching new shoes. I admire traditions. From afar. At least, in theory. In an abstract, symbolic way. The meaning and the message is more interesting to me than formula. When it comes to formula, I usually prefer to wing it.

Which is why I enjoy gluten-free baking.

My skill set groove runs deep on the intuitive side.

I bake like I paint. Observing. Listening. Responding to what is in front of me. If a recipe calls for x amount of flour and I sense the dough is too wet, I'll add more flour until the dough feels "right" to me. Experience helps. No doubt about it. The process of trial and error gives you a feel for gluten-free dough, an inkling about the muffin batter and how it might behave on any given day. Which varies, I hate to tell you.

So I pay attention to elements like humidity, and room temperature. Weather.

Bread dough will behave differently on a hot and humid day than it will on a windy, cold one. So recipes may have to change a bit. The amount of milk or brown rice flour may need to be adjusted. Baking gluten-free is more of an art than a science.

I recommend you tune in to your ingredients and learn how they behave. Learn how humidity affects flour- notice it's dampness. Or dryness. Dry flours will soak up more liquid. A cool and drafty kitchen may require a longer rise time. A thin metal bread pan may bake the outside faster than the inside can keep up. Your oven may run a tad hot. Or lag behind and never quite pre-heat itself.

Gluten-free baking requires your full attention. A dash of patience. An intimacy with your ingredients. A willingness to adjust. And most of all, developing an intuition you can trust.

Even if it goes against tradition.

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