high altitude soda bread

Making my own bread has always appealed to me, mostly because people always told me making bread is "so easy". Since moving to Colorado and taking a stab at making bread I've been pretty unsuccessful, ending up with loaves that were burned on the outside and undercooked on the inside. I know this is because baking at altitude requires adjustments, but never knew what those adjustments were.

So after the ton cake I made, FH suggested, if I wanted to keep trying to bake, to make something he might want to eat, namely soda bread. Thinking of breads past, I was a little worried to try it, so decided to make it Friday night while he was out with a friend visiting from New Hampshire. I did a search and found this high altitude cooking blog with a recipe and went to the grocery to get the ingredients. That proved to be interesting because it was snowing and most of the homeless people in my neighborhood were wandering the aisles. Also, it took me 10 minutes to find the butter milk because I was looking in the butter aisle until redirected to the milk aisle by one of the aforementioned homeless people. And I was interrogated by the manager on check out because I had purchased 4 boxes of baking soda and salt for my neti pot and that set off some alarm that I might actually be cooking meth (FH said "well you do fit the profile, skinny and too much energy").

In any case, I got home and got started.

all the ingredients...wait...something's missing - oh yeah, need a glass of wine

the recipe said to mix the ingredients with a paddle attachment - I had no idea what that meant so just used the attachment I had, a kind of whisk looking thing

...which proved to not work so well as the batter formed a column up the whisk thing and then stopped turning

I finally turned the dough out to knead it and, as per the directions, it was unwieldy and sticky - I flopped it around in the flour for a few minutes and figured "fuck it, it must be done"

I was supposed to put an X on the top of the bread, which was not as easy as one might think, in fact, it looked less like an X and more like the distorted signatures you create on those store pads where you have to sign your name with your finger...the weird stuff on top is sugar and buttermilk, and yes, I was supposed to do that

the recipe said to tap the bread and if it sounded hollow it was done - I was not sure exactly what that meant so I tapped it, figured I had heard a hollow sound, and pulled it out

At this point panic ensued because the instructions ended with "pull it out of the oven". Nothing about how long to cool it, whether to take it out of the bread thingy, etc. So I sent a text to my friend Camile who said to let it cool an hour and then take it out of the tin. She also said the picture made the bread look yummy and that if it sucked just to put butter on it because butter can make anything taste good.

the bread cooked through! and was edible!

I ended up eating the end piece off the bread after it cooled to check that it cooked through and that it was not disgusting. It tasted good except I thought it was a bit floury. Turns out soda bread is supposed to taste like that. I brought it over to FH's house and he and his friend both ate a piece. They suffered no ill effects that I know of.