I did some experimenting and found that the mass of buttermilk is nearly the same as water. This means you can forego measuring cups and scale the buttermilk. To be scientifically accurate, 1.75c water is 414gm. So use a splash less buttermilk and see if that helps.

My dough was super sticky too and I had to add at least 1/3c flour to make it manageable.

As for burned bottoms, try a different rack height in your oven. I used a cool glass pie pan on the center slot. I checked it at 40 minutes, decided it was brown enough so put foil over it. My thermapen showed it was nearly done in most places, so after 3 minutes tented I turned off the oven and left it in another 5 minutes. No scorched bottoms.

My glass measuring cup isn’t accurate. I looked up the mass of water, 236.6gm/cup, and tried my dry measuring cups to see what worked. 1 dry cup plus 3 1/4 cups plus 1 dry teaspoon is 418gm which is just 4gm over the precise mass of 1.75 cups water. Close enough for kitchen science, and who knows what the mass of buttermilk is? So we go by volume. And it’s good to know how to get repeatable accuracy of ingredients (scale everything!)

I have enough real whole milk buttermilk left to make another loaf so I will try my workaround and see how it goes. I used the glass measuring cup yesterday and the dough was really wet; I had to add nearly half a cup of flour to get it right. The bread was still great and even had a little crumb.

Hi Lisa, This is a sticky dough. Does yours look similar to the video tutorial above? There are a lot of variables that go into the consistency – there’s nothing wrong with adding just a little more flour to bring the dough into a less sticky and knead-able consistency.

Two questions: the bottom of my bread is quite hard and difficult to cut through ( baked 48 min on a parchment-lined baking sheet). This has happened before when baking other soda bread recipes. Any suggestions to minimize this?

Also, my dough was very sticky and difficult to handle …it didn’t gather as easily as yours ( from your photo) and I did not want to add too much extra flour ( I weighed flour originally). Any thoughts?

My final product still looked beautiful and tasted great!
Thank you!

Lisa T.