While that recipe definitely looks tasty. It does not look like proper brown bread. And brown bread is soda bread. White soda bread, or soda bread with fruit and seeds has some history in Ireland, but these days it’s almost unheard of. And the sweet, dense loaves you find in the US bear little resemblance to any form of soda bread.
As for this recipe? Bread flour is a bad choice, Irish flour on the whole is softer (less protein) than US flour. Bread flour (which has loads of protein) Will give you a dense, doughy loaf. AP flour is fine, if a little too protein heavy. Cake/pastry flour is lighter on protein than Irish flours but it’ll work too.
The wheat germ is there to mimic Irish extra coarse whole meal flour. Which has the whole germ and big craggy pieces of bran in it. Adding some wheat germ and coarse bran to American whole wheat gets you a bit closer to the real deal. But whole wheat flour will do on its own. I get Odlum’s Whole Meal at an Irish market not to far away. It’s nowhere close to American whole wheat with the additions, so I find it to be wasted effort if I don’t have the real stuff. So without Odlum’s I stick to American whole wheat just as it is. King Arthur also makes an Irish style coarse whole meal in the US. But innitially they used a strong wheat by mistake. They’ve corrected the mistake but I haven’t tried the new version. Fat or butter additions are intended to block the formation of gluten, mimicking Irish flour with stronger American. But this recipe involves bread flour and kneading. Which produce gluten, defeating the purpose.
And soda bread generally should not contain sugar. Though I’ll cop to adding a bit of brown sugar sometimes, ads a nice flavor.
To get the real thing the recipe should contain only flour, salt, baking soda, butter milk. With an appropriately light dough, no added baking powder or yeast should be neccisary. The most traditional additions would be a small amount of rolled oats, And in some very narrow places carroway seeds (I grew up with both). The dough should be mixed minimally. And should not be kneaded at all if it can be avoided. The whole idea is to minimize gluten. Just enough to hold it together as bread.
I’ll try to find the two recipes I’ve been using lately when I get home. One is rigidly hardcore. The other is Americanized with small amounts of butter and sugar, they do give a nice flavor. And help compensate for American AP flour when making a mixed loaf rather than all white or all wheat.
Eta: come to think of it wheat loaves with lots of fruits and seeds do have some popularity in Ireland these days. But from what I understand it’s more of a health food trend than anything. And they aren’t considered the same thing, or usual sort of brown or soda bread. My one cousin sold a bread not unlike this in a bakery over there, And some of us still make it. It was sold as “healthful wheaten bread” and was a separate product from their brown bread.
