Farm to Market’s Irish soda bread makes a tasty breakfast sandwich

If you’re longing for a traditional Irish breakfast in the days leading up to St. Patrick’s Day – Monday, March 17 – but don’t want to actually make the combination of eggs, bacon, bangers (British slang for sausages), Irish soda bread, fried potatoes and Irish tea, the iconic Browne’s Irish Marketplace (3300 Pennsylvania) begins serving its version of an Emerald Isle-style breakfast beginning at 8 a.m. tomorrow.

Browne’s breakfast includes all of the above and coffee, orange juice and tomatoes, and you can have it Saturday, Sunday (beginning at 10 a.m.) and Monday – the actual feast day of the saint – from 7 to 11:30 a.m.

But if you’d rather avoid the crowds, particularly on Monday, but you still want to use one of the round, scone-like loaves of limited-edition, sugar-glazed Irish soda bread made by Kansas City’s Farm to Market Bread Co. through Monday, we have an idea for you.

This bread, sold by Farm to Market for the last 12 years during the days leading up to St. Patrick’s Day, is made with golden raisins, buttermilk and butter. Toasted, it’s as comforting as a freshly baked sweet roll, but even with its distinctive sweetness, the dense loaf makes a very good breakfast sandwich.

We split the bread and filled it with a fried egg and Irish bangers (in this case imported from RJ Balson’s and Sons) and topped it with a slice of Irish white cheddar (the Kerrygold brand). The bread is somewhat crumbly, so it’s not the easiest sandwich to eat, but the combination of the sweet bread, tart cheese and slightly greasy sausages is very satisfying. If you prefer to eat like Leopold Bloom (the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses) you can substitute the bangers with fried kidneys.