No. You said:
What Americans are making and calling Soda Bread is not Barmbrack. Or even an attempt at it. Its not that we’ve confused the two. I brought up the yeast because its the central reason the two aren’t similar.
Barmbrack is levened with yeast. And the batter sometimes uses egg.
The american soda bread is still leavened with soda and butter milk.
Yeast leavening gives an entirely different flavor, structure and even color than chemical levening. I’ve never handed a piece of barmbrack to some one and had them misidentify it as soda bread. Most people seem to think it’s fruit cake. And the soda bread you pick up at the supermarket bears little resemblance to barmbrack. Aside from having fruit in it.
I would be ecstatic if soda bread I could purchase locally was “soft and slightly airy”. The American default is best described as hard, dense, and oddly soggy. Most American sourced soda bread recipes I’ve tried produce the same. Soda bread should have a fine, dense crumb. And it should be firm rather than cakey. But it should definitely be tender and not leaden.
I mostly see raisins. Once or twice cranberries. As the fruit in there. But bakeries will toss all sorts of fruits and seeds in there
American Soda Bread and recipes the resulting “bread” most closely resemble poorly made scones.
Yes. All I was pointing out is the fruit in the American kind didn’t come from barmbrack. It comes from a documented tradition of tossing some fruit in that shit on Christmas and Easter. Which went overboard when the Irish landed in the us. Where they could afford to do that all the time.
Brown bread is soda bread. Its less a descendant than just the whole meal flour variation. And has existed about as long as white soda bread has. And its largely the default format in Ireland. Though the white is apparently having a bit of a come back these days.
