Whole Wheat Guinness Bread With A Beautiful Oat-Sprinkled Top Recipe

While some people bake bread for the love of it, others find the process intimidating. Enter soda bread. Baking soda bread is an incredibly easy way to get wonderful results with homemade bread. There's no yeast involved — the baking soda, which gives the bread its name, helps it rise when it reacts with acidic buttermilk — so the tricky steps are eliminated. Irish Guinness bread is a traditional brown soda bread made with whole wheat flour, oats, and Guinness stout, and it delivers on taste and texture as well as the healthfulness of whole grains.

Recipe developer Michelle Bottalico has created a recipe that guides you through the steps of quickly making an incredible Guinness bread. Traditional recipes use coarse wholemeal flour made from soft Irish wheat. The closest you can get in the U.S. is stone-ground whole wheat flour, if you can find it (if you can't, use regular whole wheat flour). This loaf is incredibly moist, with a deep, rich flavor from the Guinness extra stout and a hint of earthy sweetness from a touch of molasses. Serving it with butter just ups the decadence.

You can prep this bread in less than 15 minutes: The prep time shown here includes an hour to let the loaf cool completely before slicing, so it doesn't fall apart, but it's also delicious served warm. Keep this recipe handy, because a warm slice of Guinness bread is a delicious treat around Saint Patrick's Day or, really, any day of the year.

For this recipe, you will need whole wheat flour. Choose stone-ground whole wheat flour if you can find it for extra texture. This is also known as course wholemeal flour, depending on where you live. You will also need rolled oats. The other ingredients are baking soda, baking powder, salt, Guinness stout, buttermilk, and molasses.

Preheat the oven to 400 F.

Grease a 5x7-inch loaf pan with butter and line with optional greased parchment paper if desired.

Place the flour, oats, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a mixing bowl and whisk until mixed evenly.

Place the Guinness, buttermilk, and molasses in a second bowl and whisk well to combine.

Gradually pour the wet ingredients into the flour mixture and stir until just combined. Do not overmix.

Transfer the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.

Sprinkle the top of the batter with oats and lightly press them in with the back of a spoon.

Bake for 45-50 minutes until the bread is risen and golden brown, and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Let the loaf cool for 5 minutes and then transfer it to a wire rack to cool completely.

Slice and serve the bread. Store leftovers in a closed paper bag on the counter for up to 3 days or freeze.

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Guinness brown bread is a soda bread, and compared to many of the unique types of bread in the world, it's a really easy bread to make because there's no kneading or waiting for yeasted bread to rise. Still, knowing a few tips will help the bread come out perfectly. Make sure you use whole wheat bread; the coarser the better. White flour just won't give you the right heartiness, flavor, and texture. Make sure to use old-fashioned rolled oats, too. While you can use quick oats in a pinch (but not instant), rolled oats have the most texture, which is especially important if you're using regular whole wheat flour.

Buttermilk is an important ingredient. Besides contributing liquid, it is acidic and reacts with baking soda to leaven the bread. If you don't have buttermilk or don't want to buy it just for a loaf of bread, you can make your own by adding two to three teaspoons of vinegar or lemon to a cup of dairy or plant milk. If you're using plant milk, Bottalico recommends organic unsweetened soy milk because it has a higher protein content and reacts more to the acid.

Don't overmix the batter, so it doesn't get tough. Finally, don't delay between making the batter and getting the pan in the oven, because the baking soda will start to react as soon as you mix it with the liquid.

Guinness bread is an Irish brown bread that contains Guinness Extra Stout, as the name suggests, so it's an important ingredient in the traditional version of the bread. Guinness stout has an exceptionally rich and complex flavor, which it imparts to the bread. If you can't find Guinness, you can substitute something else, although, as one of the most recognizable beer brands in the world, it shouldn't be too hard to find. If you prefer not to use it, you could substitute a different kind of stout. And, if you wanted to use a lighter ale or beer, you can. The bread will still be good, but it will have a less rich and noticeable flavor.

For those who don't cook with or consume alcohol, you can skip the beer entirely. The result will be a perfectly good whole wheat soda loaf, but without the strong flavor twist. Guinness contributes carbonation as well as flavor, so a carbonated liquid such as seltzer or club soda will work. Just replace it in a 1:1 ratio and proceed as normal. If you're fine with non-alcoholic beer, Guinness makes a non-alcoholic version called Guinness 0.0 that would give the bread a fuller flavor.

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