Sometimes all you need is this life is some fresh bread. Good homemade hot out of the oven fresh bread. You need your house to smell like browning flour and you need to watch it grow in the oven into something magical. You need to slather it with butter and jam and you need to not feel guilty about that because you made the bread and your eating the fruits of your labor. You need homemade bread.

But sometimes you don’t have 2 days to make good bread, or 2 weeks to make sourdough. Sometimes you need instant gratification. Or at least, 2 hour gratification. Sometimes you need Irish Soda Bread.

Irish soda bread is the denser, more rustic but very charming cousin to French or Italian bread, and maybe a sibling to cornbread.It is usually made with brown flour, although I did some research and found that white bread would be special occasion bread. It’s leavened with baking soda (hence the name) and it’s delicious. Seriously delicious. It’s also seriously easy to make. You simply mix the wet, mix the dry and mix it together. Like making cornbread. But this is a recipe where the whole is greater then the sum of it’s parts because out of this simple mix comes nuttier, moist, completely wonderful brown bread that begs for butter.

I think this is the sort of bread not to over complicate. There’s a great article in Epicurious about the origins of soda bread and it says that there should only be buttermilk, soda, flour and salt in it, but this recipe has some brown sugar and some oats as well, mostly because I like oats and brown sugar. So there.

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1 3/4 cups whole wheat flour

2 tablespoons old-fashioned oats plus more for coating

2 tablespoons (packed) dark brown sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 cups (about) buttermilk

Preheat oven to 425F

Combine the dry ingredients