Thursday, March 24, 2011

When Irish Tummies Are Hungry

Once again, forgive the belatedness of this post. Last Thursday, as you all know, was St. Patrick's Day. Hurray! A day of validation for everybody in the country to get pissed--as in drunk. I for one usually skip the green beer and Guinness since I am not much of a drinker. My husband David, however, would probably bathe in Guinness on a daily basis if society permitted. In his opinion, it's the greatest invention since sliced bread. Speaking of bread....

The reason I look forward to March 17th year after year is for the food. Corned beef and cabbage, to be more specific. In my house growing up, my mother always made corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day. I vividly remember how giddy my father would become when it was brought to the table. I always ate it and enjoyed it--afterall, I can count on one hand the number of foods I don't like--but I don't think I ever truly appreciated the meal until I was a little older. Looking back, I see how special it was; the way that turkey is special on Thanksgiving Day. Technically, one could eat corned beef any day of the year, as many do. But to save it for that one special meal, served piping hot with cabbage, potatoes, and carrots on the side is the stuff that true comfort food is made of. And the extra special touch? Irish soda bread...mmmm.....but first, the meat...

I decided to cook a big batch to feed a few of my neighbors. I enjoy cooking for people whenever I can. It leaves me with a very pleased, grandmotherly feeling inside to stuff people senseless. I would've loved to have used my giant Le Crueset dutch oven to cook the corned beef in, simply because I relish any excuse to use it (it's even bright orange so it goes with the Irish flag!), but the day fell on a Thursday, so I had to leave the job to the old crockpot to handle while I was at work. Between the 5 lb. hunk of beef, the head of cabbage, six potatoes, and several carrots, there was no way it was going to all fit in my dinky crockpot. I ended up having to borrow my neighbor Becky's extra large sized crockpot and actually ended up splitting all of the ingredients in two--even the XL pot couldn't hold all the food. So, side by side, the crockpot neighbors did their thing while I brought home my share of the bacon. Just a figure of speech of course--there's no bacon in my corned beef and cabbage!

I had it all planned out. I would arrive home from work with the food cooked to completion, and I would be all ready to get my June McCleaver on and serve. I was a little distressed to discover that my crockpot seemed to outdo the XL one by quite a bit. When I removed the covers, my pot was bubbling away like a magical Irish love potion. The beef was falling-apart-tender and the cabbage, carrots, and potatoes were steamy and soft. Perfection. Clearly, my little crockpot's lid does exactly what it's supposed to do--stay tightly sealed so none of the needed steam escapes. The other lid must not have gotten the memo because, while indeed cooked, the meat was much tougher when prodded with a fork, the cabbage still in a crunchier state than the limp, wet (I know, it sounds gross) state it should've been in, and the potatoes and carrots were definitely not fork-tender soft. There was no love potion a-bubblin' here. It was more like a I guess I kinda like you potion that stood pretty still. I cranked the heat up to the high setting and put the lid back on, hoping that maybe an extra 45 minutes or so would soften them up more by the time my neighbors arrived. It didn't help much. It was absolutely edible, but it just wasn't quite as scrumdiddliumptious as the rest of the feast.

The presentation would've been a lot more attractive had I piled it all together on the platter like a true peasant would, but instead I took the opportunity to use my modern, yet retro looking serving bowls to dish out the veggies.


My other opponent--the bread! Irish Soda Bread. Have you ever tried this gem of a baked good? If you haven't, grab your keys, get in your car, and immediately head to your nearest pub, you know, because those are everywhere in America. It's a very dense, floury tasting bread that tastes equally delicious sopping up whatever juice remains of your corned beef or shepherd's pie or just toasted plain with a little butter (my personal favorite). My mother also had this baby cornered. She could bake Irish Soda Bread like it was nobody's business. My sisters and I were all unanimously greedy when it came to this bread. With it's crusty crust and sweet interior, I couldn't get enough of it. It's truly the crack of all breads. Nom, nom, nom....

Moments like these are when I particularly miss my mother, because my bread this year was a complete and utter disaster, and I could have really used her expertise. I took a gamble on an ingredient that did not go my way. These were the ingredients that I used to make the bread:

3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/3 cup white sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 egg, lightly beaten
2 cups buttermilk
1/4 cup butter, melted

Pretty simple, right? All very usual ingredients that I always have on hand. The one thing I did NOT have was buttermilk. I had forgotten this one necessity, but I improvised. I decided to try using powdered buttermilk, which I had on hand. Yes, such a thing exists in the baking aisle.



When liquid is added to a few tablespoons of this stuff, voila!, you have buttermilk. Easy-peazy-Japanezey! But I forgot one very important thing about powdered buttermilk. When using in a recipe, you're supposed to add the powder to your dry ingredients, THEN add whatever amount of water is required to equal the amount of buttermilk the recipe calls for. My brain was clearly somewhere else. I decided to make two loaves of bread so there would be plenty. Rather than mix two loaves worth of ingredients all in one bowl and divide between two baking pans, I decided to do each loaf back to back. I have a very large bowl, but I was concerned that with the amount of ingredients I was using it would be spilling over the edges and I would have flour all over my kitchen. The recipe I decided to use this year, in leau of my favorite Julia Child Irish Soda Bread Recipe, which tastes almost identical to my mother's(that was my first mistake), called for me to mix the egg and buttermilk together. Hmmm...but I was using powdered stuff. Would this still work? So I mixed the powder with my egg and added it to the dry ingredients. This was when I was supposed to add the water. Did I remember to do that? Nooooo. I couldn't understand why my dough was so abysmally dry! The water step was a million miles away from my mind, probably in Dublin getting drunk on Guinness. So I decided to soften up the dough with some milk--plain, skim milk. I probably added a cup's worth. I wasn't sure if it would work, but I figured I had a second loaf to possibly do a better job on. It was then that the water step I'd missed dawned on me. "Oh, ffffffffarfegnugen!!" I screamed. I was only halfway through and I'd already screwed this up. I'm not entirely sure I even followed through correctly on the second loaf either.

I mixed the powder with the egg once again, but for whatever reason I added the water directly to that mixture before dumping it all into the other dry ingredients. I'm not sure if that was the right or wrong thing to do, but either way, it didn't produce a fantastic result. Loaf number one spewed in the oven like a doughy volcano. It literally barfed all over itself in it's pan and onto the oven floor. Loaf number two stayed in its pan, browned nicely, but still didn't turn out how I'd hoped.



The crust was not a crispy crust and the interior had the texture of a poundcake rather than a bread. It didn't even taste like real Irish Soda Bread. It tasted more like a biscuit--still good, but NOT soda bread. I was so disappointed. It was just all wrong from start to finish. But I like to think of every single cooking/baking session as a learning experience, and what I learned is this:

1. Never cheat on Julia Child. She is the Messiah of all kitchens, and to cheat on her bread is like selling your soul to the devil.

2. If a recipe holds such importance that it could be compared to crack, just use real buttermilk and save the powdered stuff for the pancakes on Sunday!

3. Use an oven liner. They're worth their weight in gold.


Lesson learned!! I'm still slightly bitter that I didn't get to feast on real Irish Soda Bread on St. Patrick's Day, but it's not the end of the world. At least now I know if I'm ever in the mood for biscuit bread, I've got it in the bag!

What did YOU eat for St. Patrick's Day?

1 comment:

  1. Sadly, we didn't eat anything special for St. Patrick's. We are bad part-Irish people. We may have watched an episode of the Misfits, and one of the characters IS Irish, maybe that counts? :)

    If you don't have buttermilk, you can use white vinegar! That's what I do for my cornbread. But yours looked pretty and I'm sure it tasted great.

    ReplyDelete