This week was St Patrick’s Day, so it seemed only right to celebrate. As the Head Chef for GGG is from Northern Ireland, we decided to pick out some Northern Irish treats. It wouldn’t be Northern Irish food, without an Ulster Fry! A classic breakfast consisting of sausages, bacon, eggs, black and white pudding, potato bread and soda bread. Naturally, some of these ingredients aren’t veggie, so we chose to focus on the bread elements to tie the meal together.
Potato Bread
The first step was to make the potato bread (aka tatty bap). We used a recipe from Christina’s Cucina which was super easy to follow.
Essentially the recipe is a mixture of mashed potato with flour, so it’s an ideal treat with very few ingredients.
We used a potato ricer rather than a masher for the potato, just to make sure there were no lumps in the finished dough. If you’re just using a masher, make sure you’re thorough with the mashing!
Once you have the dough, it’s ready to roll out and pan-fry. They can be eaten at this point but we recommend leaving them covered and frying them in the same pan as the sausages and bacon for extra flavour!
Soda Farls
For the second bread component of this breakfast dish, it’s soda farls! For these we used a recipe from BBC Good Food.
The soda farls again are just made from store-cupboard ingredients and are delicious with or without the rest of the breakfast.
Once the mixture has formed a dough, roll it out and cut into quarters. From there these quarters are pan-fried until golden.
The Ulster Fry
Now we have the key bread ingredients, it’s time to form the Ulster fry. Using the Head Chef’s knowledge and previous Ulster fry experience, we were able to put the meal together.
We’ve used Linda McCartney veggie sausages for this dish. In a typical Ulster fry, the best black and white pudding to use is by Clonakilty, who have just brought out a veggie pudding, so we will be giving this a try! Don’t forget that the addition of bacon to a breakfast is always welcome if that’s what you fancy.
In terms of cooking technique, just fry! We never said this was a healthy breakfast 😉
If you give the whole dish a go (or even just one of the breads) please let us know on social media – we’d love to see it!
For the main course – Click here
Skip to dessert? – Click here