Why is the white bread in Ireland so dire?

I have never found anything quite like soda bread anywhere but Ireland.

Having said that, I wouldn't really search it out abroad because like that nectar Bass in my boozing days, I just know the results were not going to be good.

Bass was digusting in Ireland too incidentally, just in case I am giving the wrong idea, it was an English Burton brew that became as bad to come across in a pub abroad as an English person on a boozy weekend.

Germany has it's own take on things, I would never go for anything but what the local Germans were fond of.

Germany has great bread, it can be very distinctive. I certainly would have to be desperate for soda bread to want to go making it in a hotel room.

Being the only form of cooking appliance available, the use of a hotel kettle to produce soda bread would pose a challenge :-)

A person after my own heart.

I am not as well organised and the knees are no longer the more sporty version my mother presented me with, you sound like you are a person with "your eye on the ball".

The nice thing about sourdough is that you can let it snooze in the fridge and not return to a collapsed splodge around the bread tin when you forget.

I suppose normal kneaded bread could be refrigerated for any fanatics wanting to "take back control", but it's not something I ever experimented with.

Frankly, sourdough is tremendously satisfying, an excellent bread for the workshy due to the brief activity and long rests to recover from the exertion plus of course the flavour at the end.

It works well with plain flour also, but I rarely use it and play "safe", as you never know if the loaf you pull out of the oven fabricated from plain flour would have been just that little bit closer to perfection with strong bread flour.

hehehe one thing I can definetly never be accused of is being anywhere good near a ball :)

But I do like to cook and bake. Bread is one of my faves. Making my own pasta. Hunting or raising my own meat. And do not get me STARTED on how much I like making dips :)

I work out a lot - but I will trade a kettlebell for a good 10 minute doughneeding any time :)

But I do like making one dough the night before, one dough in the morning ,and putting them both in the oven together. Its the most wonderful smell to come back to after a run. Your whole DNA ancestry says "yes please" to that smell :)

“Sliced Pan” like Brennans or Pat the Baker is industrially produced sandwich bread. In common with the U.S., it’s made with a specific type of low protein wheat that produces a very fluffy North American flour that’s used in that kind of product.

The quality of those is slightly better than their US counterparts, and than most “pain de mie” in France too, but it is what it is. It’s intended for toast and simple sandwiches.

All anglophone countries have similar bread for this kind of purpose. It’s also very similar to the stuff you’ll find in prepackaged sandwiches and so on in lots of places and often what’s used for toast.

Unless you’re shopping in some pretty crappy supermarkets or petrol stations, there’s loads of decent bakery bread available in most and there are quite a lot of good bakeries and other shops carrying excellent bread. I don’t really think it’s reasonable to say there isn’t. I can walk into any number of shops within a short distance of where I am and get really good bread.

If you go into any cafe or small restaurant, you’re also highly unlikely to be served up a sandwich on Brennans or similar. It’s usually sourdough or something fairly decent.

Is that by any chance the "Chorley" process?

It was developed in the UK to feed the great unwashed with carbohydrates as cheaply as possible.

Basically it relies on very vigorous activity to generate heat and gluten chains rapidly, thus giving the yeast a bit of a boost. I guess the yeast strain would be specific to the process, any self respecting, decent yeasties would end up just dying at such mistreatment, always assuming they wouldn't just lose the will to live when presented with the task of making the garbage anyway!

It wasn't popular when it came out amongst people that valued flavour and quality.

I believe that vitamins, probably C amongst others are needed to replace the stuff destroyed by the process.

It satisfies an aim of food manufacturers, fast, cheap and bland. That way you sell to rthe majority and only upset a few gourmets.

Beer was the same, bland, fizzy and crystal clear were the prime goals.

I recollect that the Chorley stuff was all that was available from the "bread van" delivering house to house, I still remember it, white, rubbery stuff we certainly ate it as kids, I wouldn't touch the garbage now. Soda bread is less than an hour away if I want a quick loaf from scratch.

The premise of this thread is very out of date. The OP even points it out by saying Ireland's 2 biggest supermarkets now stock good bread.

It also plays to another myth that most of Europe doesn't have sliced pan which it does. Also it's crap and Ireland probably has the best massed production sliced pan in Europe.

Where we fall down is less corner shop bakeries and the ones we do have are underused just like the incredibly high quality butchers Ireland has an abundance of.

As for soda bread the stuff tastes amazing and it has a place in my heart as a north Limerick city person but it's not very versatile compared to something like a baguette or sourdough loaf.

And also much of the bread in Europe is made by human hands , in our factories its automation:(

Your post reminds me of the cheese in the early long before the EU days. Coming here to Ireland, there were two brands of cheese available, nothing else, no Cheddar, or continental cheese at all.

There was Galtee which was as orange as Trump and probably had the same bouquet too if the rumours about Trump are right, and then there was the pale, corpse like stuff, which was basically the same as Galtee without the colouring.

God forbid any poor tourist should end up coming here and asking for a cheese sandwich, or even worse cheese on toast. I still recall the difficulty actually melting the cheese on the bread and snatching it from the grill in the milliseconds before the cheesy bubbles expanded and carbonised.

Bread was unsliced, white and tasted fine with a short shelf life if I recall, but everyone made soda bread then anyway. We had an iron three legged pot with a cover, serving a similar purpose to my dutch oven without the turf pyre to generate heat these days.

Exactly same with Spain, the brand bimbo available most places is dire

There are great selections of bread out there. For example Lidl and Dunnes have great selections.

Sure, you have to go to the trouble of slicing yourself.

I blame the sandwich culture. I think the main sliced pan brands are too handy for making tidy, uniform sandwiches, so dominate the convenience stores.

Speaking of cheeses, you see a drastic change here in the late 1600s, which coincided with the land confiscations during and the Cromwell era and the turmoil that occurred here.

Ireland had, like all of Europe, a long standing cheese making tradition, with historical references to a wide variety of soft and hard cheeses. All of these suddenly disappeared and the entire dairy industry moved to the production of butter, largely for expert.

Ireland’s cheese making completely disappeared to the point it was almost unheard of through the 1700s and 1800s. The only references you see are to cheese as an ultra luxury product, either imported or produced on a tiny scale.

There was basically no cheese at all in the mainstream Irish diet though the 1700s and 1800s. Industrial cheddar was introduced in the early 1900s, with most of it being exported as processed cheese, as there was no domestic demand.

You don’t really see Irish artisanal cheese emerge again until the 1970s, and that was largely down to interaction with continental Europe, rather than a rediscovery of lost cheese making.

It’s basically a tale of colonialism, forced displacement, attempts at ethnic cleansing, oppression and an extremely drastic disruption of rural life wiped out a whole food culture, to the point we don’t really even know what it was like. Irish food became extremely bland and was just subsistence rather than a cuisine. That ultimately leads up to the Great Famine, which is basically the outcome of a total disruption of rural life here after that cromwellian era. It didn’t just continue to evolve like most of Europe.

Whatever our food culture was, it was fairly dramatically erased and replaced with early industrialisation of commercial farming, focused on very few large scale basis products, very much for export.

We’ve more in common with places that were colonised, or with places that had rural life disrupted later by communism in Eastern Europe and Asia than we do with wealthier parts of Western Europe in terms of food culture.

While the reasons and politics were different, and it occurred earlier and was more prolonged, our rural life and living structures were dismantled and completely and totally disrupted. We basically don’t have any long standing food culture at all, until we reinvented one in the second half of the 20th century.

That’s why we don’t really have any traditional regional dishes, other than a few bread recipes. It may also be why things like fish were very much absent in Irish diets. You don’t see much in the way of traditional smoked meats or anything at all really, yet if you dig into older history you see a lot of references to fish, cured meats, cheese etc. So it’s basically a culture we lost.

It’s one reason I get annoyed with the potato jokes and the slagging off of the lack of depth of Irish food culture and Ireland’s rapid adoption of influences from other food cultures. If you’re mocking it, you’re basically mocking a rather tragic erasure of a whole culture, famine and a period of ethnic cleansing that’s centuries ago but left horrific scars here and scattered us to the ‘New World‘.

There quite literally wasn’t any grand peasant food tradition here, so when things stabilised in the 20th century, we adopted food from elsewhere. It wasn’t a case of developing a love affair with anything. We became wealthier and embraced 20th century processed foods more rapidly than most. The outlook we had was largely a focus on late 19th century American or British processed food as a desirable thing and that grew as we got some degree of wealth again. Then you see drastic changes as we got more exposure to French influences in particular in the 60s and 70s and the Italian and other continental cuisines too an it grew broader and broader, you see a lot of inspiration of what is a flourishing fusion food culture nowadays, but it’s not one that has long roots here. We used Irish ingredients, but we effectively learned to cook all over again in the 20th century and we’ve borrowed from everywhere to do that.

If you’re looking for an Irish food culture though it’s very threadbare. There was just nothing to build upon.

It would be interesting to figure out some of the pre 1600s stuff but it’s so far back that it’s hard to know what might have evolved from it. It’s likely though that there would have been a distinct cuisine here had it just not been so drastically disrupted.

I'm guessing they close that day but if there's another explanation it, it should be good :)

The local bakery here opens Wednesday - Saturday only.

closed one day a week, and Tuesdays only get the stuff if there's some left from supplying local hotels

Spot on, genocide was not solely the prerogative of Adolf and his cult.

One wonders if it will be feasible to show the tyrants that we can forgive and forget,

Sending a few barrels of soup to their post Brexit food banks would be nice.

Maybe if they could break a few stones, empty a harbour or two of water and sing a few ditty's for it it would be of benefit? I don't think charity would be beneficial at all :-)

There was an unbelievable level of ignorance, arrogance and rubbish bandied about in Westminster that if the tables were turned would sound like total madness when the actions in Ireland were "justified" by the clueless or those that didn't want to know.

Methinks when people go on about reparations for slavery, there are some practices that pre date that abomination.

The other thing of course is that their support of a "right of return" for a race, means that restitution is the right of a people, even if they were forced out of their homes, like my own ancestors were. I want my countries trees back for a start!

Then we can send the soup :-)