How To Get Soda Bread to Rise
Over the years many of my readers have asked how make Finally Really Good Sandwich Bread without yeast. Wanting to find a solution for the readers I had tried to make Irish Soda Bread a few times and it was always an utter failure. None of the loaves rose and I kept having to find uses for big, round, loaves of tough, barely edible bread.
Last month I started trying again. I studied soda bread recipes, figured out a good ratio of flour to baking soda and made a yeast-free version of FRGSB. The bread tasted good, but it was ever so dense, holey, and short. The bread barely rose any at all! I had to find some way to get the bread to rise!
Just in case the problem was with my recipe, I tried one of the almond flour bread recipes on the Elana’s Pantry blog to see how her soda breads looked after it was baked. Though the texture of the bread was different since her bread only uses almond flour, the bread was still short and dense. Since I couldn’t find any pictures of high-rising soda bread on the internet, I determined that the particular recipe was not the problem. Soda bread itself had a problem!
The Problem With Soda Bread
So, what is soda bread? It’s simply a bread dough that is leavened with baking soda (or baking powder which is baking soda plus some other stuff) rather than yeast.
For a while I thought that it might be impossible to make a light, fluffy soda bread.
But then I realized that cake is leavened with baking powder or baking soda and cakes have no problem rising. And that’s when it hit me -the reason that soda bread doesn’t rise.
Sugar.
When you mix a cake you whip sugar into butter and the whipping action incorporates lots of little tiny air bubbles into the cake batter. When the cake bakes, the baking powder/baking soda release gasses that inflate all of these little tiny bubbles and make them bigger bubbles. That’s what makes the cake rise.
Soda bread doesn’t have all of those little air bubbles, so the baking soda can’t do anything. The baking soda can’t inflate bubbles that aren’t there, so the bread doesn’t rise.
What to do?
The Solution
So, the problem becomes, “How do we get little tiny air bubbles into the soda bread?” Obviously sugar is not an option, because we don’t want the bread to be sweet.
The solution that I finally came up with is egg foam. Egg foam is egg whites that have been whipped into a thick foam. This foam contains all of the little air bubbles that we need, and if made correctly, is stable enough to be folded into the bread dough.
The next day I worked up a version of FRGSB that uses baking powder (it’s easier to work with the baking soda) and that separates the usual 3 eggs into whites and yolks so that I could make an egg foam. I have to say that mixing that dough up for the first time was one of the strangest baking experiences of my life. The egg white foam does not want to mix into the rest of the dough easily! But, it worked. The bread rose beautifully (beautifully!!!) in the oven and it didn’t fall. How much more perfect can you get?
Tips for Making Gluten Free Soda Bread That Won’t Fall
I think that if you have any problems with this recipe it will be with bread that falls after it’s taken out of the oven. Here are a few tips that I’ve found helpful in preventing a bread fall.
1. When you beat the egg foam, start out at a slow speed and then work up to a medium – high speed.
2. Add 1/4 tsp. cream of tartar to your egg whites if you’re having trouble with the bread falling.
3. Be sure to fold the egg foam into the batter very gently so that you leave as many as possible of the bubbles intact.
4. Be sure to bake the bread until it is done. The most surefire method for doing this is to use a thermometer to measure the internal temperature of the bread. It should be 210 degrees F. If it’s not, put it back in the oven.
If you don’t have a thermometer, I strongly suggest that you buy one. They are not expensive and most larger grocery stores carry them.
If you still don’t buy one, then touch the top of the bread when you think it’s done and see if it pushes down when you touch it. If it does, put it back in the oven. The structure of the bread needs to be firmly set so that it doesn’t fall after you take it out of the oven.