• 225g self raising flour
  • 225g wholemeal flour
  • 1/2tsp bread soda
  • 3/4tsp salt
  • 125g natural yogurt
  • 1/2pt milk
  • 1 egg

Since joining Twitter (in October 2009 I think…) I have met, both in real life and online, some lovely people altogether. I *almost* met Colette (@Katzwizkaz on twitter) who blogs at Cakes, Bakes and Other Bits last summer at Totally Tipp, discovering when we got home that she had been sitting only a few chairs away from us during the cookery demonstrations!

She blogged her Mam’s brown bread recipe last year (here) and being big fans of brown soda breads here at Kitchen Towers I couldn’t wait to try it out. One thing that intrigued me was that it contained fresh milk and hazelnut yogurt instead of buttermilk. I made promises that I’d bake it then of course with other stuff going on, it went out of my head. Until I read a post by English Mum recently (here) where she substituted buttermilk with greek yogurt (which I tried out this morning and confirm are gorgeous too!) which reminded me of Colette’s recipe so I looked it up, scribbled down the ingredient list and proceeded to make it.

I left it on the kitchen counter to cool while I went to town with my mum and received a phone call from himself which went along the lines of “that new brown bread is LOVELY!” High praise indeed! The same afternoon, mum and I had salad for lunch with this bread and she’s still talking about it. We even brought two loaves with us when we went camping in Achill Island a couple of weeks ago!

I adapted Colette’s recipe very slightly, purely because of ingredients I have in the house – I always have wholemeal flour and thanks to the kids’ smoothie addiction, there is always natural yogurt in the fridge so there is more chance of me remembering to buy it than hazelnut yogurt. I would still totally recommend making it to Colette’s recipe though, it’s delish!

 

Method

Pre heat the oven to 150c and grease/line a loaf tin

Place the flours, bread soda and salt into a large mixing bowl.

In a separate bowl/jug whisk the milk and egg together.

Then add the milk and egg to the dry ingredients with the yogurt.

Mix it together until the dough comes together, it will be a wet dough so don’t panic, you haven’t done anything wrong!

Pour into a loaf tin and mark a line across the length of the loaf, this will help to give an even rise to the finished bread.

Bake in the centre of the oven for 45 minutes.

Leave to cool for about 5 minutes in the tin then remove onto a wire rack.