Bairin Breac (Irish Barmbrack)

October 02, 2023

Bairin Breac (Irish Barmbrack)

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October....the month of Halloween, and few places look forward to this time of year more than Éire or the Republic of Ireland.

Barmbrack (Bairin Breac) is a yeasted bread that is popular throughout the Republic. You'll find many YouTube and internet recipes for Barmbrack which use bicarbonate of soda / self-raising flours as leavening agents, but these tend to produce a bake that is more akin to a cake than a bread. After all, look at the name....'Barm' and 'Brack', there's a big clue!

In Elizabeth David's 1997 work, "English Bread and Yeast Cookery" (page 439), she writes:

'Recipes for barmbrack with chemically aerated dough (i.e. baking soda) abound in cookery books. T call this version barmbrack seems rather sad since its name clearly means that it was originally a bread fermented with barm or ale yeast"

Proper Bairin Breac is leavened with yeast. It's one of only a few Irish breads that is and that leads me to its own, unique, story.

Baking using beer barm was common in Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries. Commercial yeast was rare and expensive. In the later years of the 18th century the French had invented leavening through the use of bicarbonate of soda and the technique was well-suited to the vagaries of poor-quality Irish soft wheat.

By the 1830s, Ireland was ravaged by a great famine. Crops failed. The potato harvest was hit by blight to such an extent that starvation was common. What flour that could be had was poorly suited to bread. so the use of soda alongside buttermilk became common as a way of leavening a dough - the birth of Irish Soda Bread. Rural families could bake Soda bread on the hearth or open fire, essential if they didn't possess an oven.

When things eventually got better and conditions improved most families in Ireland, especially those in rural areas, celebrated key times of the year by baking festive 'treats'. Halloween, New Year's Eve and St Patrick's Day were high days if not holidays. Many households kept a tin of beer barm, the yeast by-product of beer-making, and added small quantities of flour to produce a natural yeast, similar to a sourdough starter.

This barm would be used to bake a festive fruit bread...a Bairin that would be 'speckled' (breac) with fruit. Their Celtic cousins in Wales baked bara birth, the Scots baked a tea brack and the Irish baked Bairin Breac.

Eventually, beer barm gave way to commercial yeast and dried yeast became common in Irish kitchen cupboards. The Barmbrack became the popular name for the Bairin Breac and this yeasted bread sat alongside the Irish soda bread as traditional Irish fare.

At Halloween, the Barmbrack became the centrepiece of the festive table. It was decorated with birds or animals and was baked containing little packets of items used as part of a festive fortune-telling game.

If your slice contained:

a nut or a pea - it meant that you would remain a spinster or s bachelor for a further year (sometimes a thimble was used instead)

a holy medal or a cross - meant that you would take up holy orders

a small piece of stick - meant that you would be engaged in a dispute or an unhappy marriage at some time in the future

a coin - meant wealth

a ring - meant you would be married within the year

a bean - meant you would be poor for the year

and/ or

a piece of cloth - meant a year of poverty and want.

At the end of 'A Sense of Wonder' by Van Morrison, he sings:

Pastie suppers down at Davey's Chipper,

Gravy rings, Wagon Wheels,

Barmbracks and Sno-balls.

The Barmbrack is essentially a taste of Eire...but we must remember to differentiate between the Barmbrack of YouTube and the web which tends to be a 'cake' and where the mix is leavened with bicarbonate of soda. The proper, authentic Barmbrack is a 'speckled bread' and is leavened, these days, with yeast and before that, beer barm.

The two are quite different, let's keep them apart.

A note on the baking

Originally, the yeasted barmbrack would have been baked in a pot over a peat fire. Traditionally, it's still baked in a round tin. For the formula below, a 20 cm tin works well.

If you would prefer to bake two loaves, then medium loaf pans (8 inch x 4 inch) would be ideal.

Or, one of each?

In Helen Edden's Country Recipes from Old England (Country Life 1929) and in Lady Harriet St Clair's Dainty Dishes (1866), the recipes include quantities of caraway seeds. In the latter case, 40 gms of caraway seed. This seems excessive. I prefer to use either mixed spice (as below) or a blend of cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg (to taste).

Spices: US bakers might be a little confused by the term 'Mixed Spice. If so, then you can make up a mix of a teaspoon each of ground ginger and ground cinnamon and a quarter teaspoon of ground nutmeg.

Fruit: to presoak or not to presoak? Personally, I find that when I soak fruit, it loses a lot of consistency and can be problematic when trying to incorporate it into the dough and also at baking. Also, calculating the total weight of water needed becomes a little difficult. As ca result, I tend not to presoak my fruit. Just watch the dough and judge the total water as you go along. A little more when necessary is often good advice.

INGREDIENTS

550 gms strong white bread flour (maybe a little more if the dough is particularly slack...maybe up to 600 gms....watch the dough)

180 gms tepid water (you can replace 30 gms of the water with whiskey (approximately a dram), if you so wish)

120 gms warm semi-skimmed milk

100 gms caster sugar.

1 eggs (large & beaten)

11 gms fine sea salt

3 gms grated lemon peel

12 gms dried yeast

110 gms unsalted butter (softened)

110 gms raisins

110 gms sultanas

140 gms candied peel

3 gms of mixed spice or the equivalent weight of blended cinnamon, ginger and ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg.

and for the glaze

5 gms caster sugar dissolved in 15 gms water

METHOD

Add the yeast to the tepid water, warm milk and sugar. Cover and leave until frothy.

Place the flour into a large bowl and mix in the melted butter. Add the beaten eggs, salt, spice, lemon peel and yeast mixture. Bring together and mix thoroughly. Start to knead until the dough comes together.

Judge the dough as you go along. You may need to add a little more flour....your dough and your eyes are the best judges in this matter.

Tip into a lightly oiled bowl, cover and leave in a warm place to rise until doubled.

When doubled, knock back and work the fruit into the dough until thoroughly incorporated.