Irish soda bread is a traditional no-yeast-needed bread that’s fast and easy to make. It’s an easy bread recipe for beginners or for people who want to make a loaf of homemade bread easy and quick.
This recipe for Irish Soda bread without buttermilk is my adaptation of a traditional recipe that I found and tried because I was out of buttermilk!

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How does soda bread work?
Irish soda bread uses baking soda and an acid (buttermilk or the soured milk that I used in this version) to create the reaction that makes the bread rise.
Since there’s no yeast, there’s not as much of a rise, and the bread is fairly dense. The no-buttermilk version might have a different texture than the recipe that uses buttermilk, but I’ll have to try that out.
You might want to add a little baking powder to the mix, too, to get a little more rise to the bread.
But if you just follow this recipe, you’ll get a nice, dense loaf that you can use for sandwiches or to eat on its own.
Texture-wise, this was similar to the tomato-basil bread that I made, it would be good for rustic sandwiches.
Recipe:
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Equipment needed:
- Mixing bowl
- Spoon
- Measuring cups and spoons
- Baking sheet
- Parchment paper or a silicone mat
- Cooling rack
- Instant-read thermometer
- Oven mitts/potholders
Ingredients needed:
- 3 1/2 cups of bread flour plus extra to dust the counter with.
- 1 3/4 cups milk
- 2 Tbsp vinegar
- 1 Tbsp baking soda
- 1 Tsp salt
- 1 cup shredded cheese (optional for variation 1)
- 2 Tbsp dried oregano (optional for variation 2)
- 1 Tbsp dried basil (optional for variation 2)
Instructions:
- Mix the vinegar into the milk.
- Add the dry ingredients together and mix well. If you’re doing the herb variation, add them in now.
- Pour the milk into the dry ingredients and mix well. The dough will be really sticky.
- Tip the dough out onto a floured counter and roll the dough in the flour. Mix it to shape it for about a minute but don’t knead it.
- The dough will be sticky but you want to add enough flour to make it handle-able.
- If you’re doing the cheese variation, add the cheese and mix it into the dough at this point, or with the dry ingredients.
- Form the dough into a ball and put it on the baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a silicone mat.
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
- Cut through the dough ball with a chef’s knife in a cross pattern. Separate the sections a little, they’ll come back together as the bread bakes. Make the cuts deep, almost all the way through, so that the bread will bake in the center.
- Let the bread sit for about half an hour to let the baking soda do its thing.
- Bake the bread for 30-40 minutes, testing it after 30. An instant-read thermometer inserted into the bottom should read 185 degrees if it’s done.
- Cool completely on a cooling rack. Store in an airtight container.
Tips for making the bread:

When you add the dry ingredients together, mix them up so that the baking soda and flour (and the other dry ingredients) are mixed together well before you add the milk.

When you add the milk, just stir it up and expect it to be really sticky. This is a really wet dough!

It’s sticky here, but this is how it’s supposed to look. This isn’t one of those bread doughs where it’s going to rise, so it doesn’t need to be the same texture as a yeast dough.
It’s kind of in-between a muffin dough and a bread dough, like this beer bread recipe.

When you tip it out onto the floured counter, fold it and round the dough to absorb flour to make it less sticky, but this isn’t a dough that you actually knead. You’ll be mixing more flour in as this happens and the dough will be less sticky than it started, but it won’t be totally non-sticky.

Roll the dough into the flour and make it less sticky, but expect to get your hands messy.
For a Shepherd’s Pie recipe, click here.
Variation 1: Cheese mixed in.

In the first version I basically dumped grated cheddar cheese onto the dough and pressed it in, then I rolled and folded the dough around it.

I was using the thick-grated cheese, which didn’t spread throughout the bread the way I expected it to. My first tip if you do this version would be to use the really thin grated cheese, but grated parmesan cheese would also work.

This is the cheese version when it was cut and on the baking sheet. You can see that the cheese is pretty much all on the inside, which was fine, but I think it would have been better if it was more spread out throughout the bread.
You could even add the cheese with the dry ingredients, that would spread it out more evenly.

This is the finished cheese bread, but this wasn’t actually baked all the way through!
Since this is a REALLY wet dough, you have to bake it longer than you think, and you have to make sure that the cuts in the dough ball are almost all the way through so that the heat can get to the center of the dough ball.
If you don’t, you’ll end up with a loaf of bread that’s still raw dough in the middle, which is what happened the first time with this loaf.

To test the done-ness of the loaf, use an instant-read thermometer and insert it into the bottom of the loaf. If the bread is done, it will be 185 degrees F, and if it’s not there yet, it’s still raw inside.

This is the bread when I cut it open, which I did when it was right out of the oven, because I’m impatient. You should let it cool off, but I didn’t want to wait.
I’m glad that I didn’t wait, because it wasn’t cooked all the way through in the center, and I decided to cut slices off of the middle section and put it back in the oven.

After baking these for ten minutes longer, they were fine, plus, the cheese had melted and they were like a grilled cheese sandwich.
My husband made the comment that this bread would be really good for grilled cheese, and he’s right. It’s a dense loaf that will take a lot of abuse without getting crushed.
You could put this bread in a panini press and it would hold up nicely.
Variation 2: Herbs Mixed in.

For this variation I added dried herbs into the dry ingredient mix, and you can see a little bit of that if you look closely at the dough ball.

Since this was the second time I made the recipe and I wanted to avoid the unbaked center, I really cut through the dough ball so that the cut went all the way through.

Since the dough is still wet, the center is still sticky, and you have to kind of separate the sections a little bit. When the bread goes into the oven it will rise up and join together in the center, but you want the heat to be able to get into the center to prevent it from being raw dough.
I had to clean the knife in between cuts, and the dough inside is still really sticky. That’s normal, but make sure that the center especially is cut through so that the heat can bake it.

Here’s the baked loaf. I took it out of the oven after 30 minutes and the thermometer showed that it was only at 175 inside, so I put it back in for another ten minutes until it got to 185.
I think that it wouldn’t take as long to bake if the dough wasn’t so wet, but I’ll test that out with the next loaf.

Here’s the baked bread with the herbs in it. It’s still a dense loaf but it’s baked all the way through! The crust on this loaf is very crusty, which is normal for a wet dough.
You can substitute any kind of herbs that you’d like to for this. I used oregano and basil, but you could use thyme and sage or another combination. I’ve seen recipes where people made it more of a sweet profile with cinnamon and ginger, so it’s a versatile recipe.

I like this bread, and my husband actually cackled with glee when I told him I was making more of it. It’s a nice, rustic loaf that you can make quickly without any prep work or rising time, so it could be a daily bake.