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While you can make this Irish classic ahead, “You want fresh bread,” Chef Jess told The Irish Times (and we agree). Bonus: “The smell in the house will be amazing,” she says.

Bonus on bonus: This recipe takes mere minutes to make (as Chef Jess demonstrated in the below Instagram post filmed at ICE), and its ingredients — though specific to Galway, the place she and her restaurant call home — can be substituted for things sold in most American grocery stores.

Another beneficial aspect of the recipe is its flexibility. Chef Jess experiments with it often by swapping in (and swapping out) seeds like flax, chia and sunflower. 

One of Chef Jess' key ingredients is, perhaps, an unexpected inclusion in bread for most American palates: seaweed. Her favorite seaweed, dillisk (called dulse in North America) is a dried red seaweed packed with nutrients including iodine, calcium and magnesium. Chef Jess' dillisk is from the Aran Islands off of the East coast of Ireland, near Galway. It's traditionally picked fresh in the summer and dried on the high fences lining sheep enclosures.

"[The seaweed] adds a bit of minerality, so you're gonna get nice, salty, beautiful minerals — and as we know, seaweed's a superfood," Chef Jess says.

Once all of the ingredients are added (including Chef Jess' favorite salt, smoked Apple Island sea salt) you have a thick, earthy-brown dough. 

The key to a solid, yet springy bread is to mix with restraint. 

"Technically, you’re making a cake," says Chef Jess. "[This is] like a muffin or a pancake batter. Brown soda bread is almost like a lumpy cake bread … over-mixing the stuff is a little unnecessary."

And what is a savory, cake-like delicacy without an appropriate accoutrement to match? In Chef Jess' eyes, topping Irish brown bread with organic Irish butter is a requirement.

"You want yellow, Irish clean organic butter — like a raw milk butter," she says. "You can get amazing American raw milk butters as well. But, with grass-fed Irish butter, cows are going straight out onto fields to feed. So they're eating all the nettles, the clovers, the wild sweet peas that are growing in the grass. They're eating all those super ingredients. They're digesting them for you and then we're coming out and we're making beautiful butter with that. So this butter is actual medicine."

If bread and butter is medicine, Kai Restaurant's regulars are the healthiest people in the world. Here's how to recreate Chef Jess' magic at home.