Name: Milk, or Salt Rising Bread
Ingredients: 1 quart warm water (or water and new milk); flour (enough to make a thin batter); coarse sea salt (to taste); additional flour (to make a soft dough)

Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Milk, or Salt Rising Bread

Ingredients

1 quart warm water (or water and new milk)
flour (enough to make a thin batter)
coarse sea salt (to taste)
additional flour (to make a soft dough)

Directions

Make the starter

In a pitcher, mix warm water (or water and new milk) with enough flour to make a thin batter.
Place the pitcher in a kettle of warm water, maintaining a temperature of 70°F to 80°F.
Cover the pitcher with a saucer and let it sit for about 5 hours until it begins to rise with fine bubbles.

Shape and bake

Add 1 quart of water and a little more salt, then mix in flour to form a soft dough.
Transfer the dough into 3 brick-shaped baking tins and let it rise until nearly doubled in size.
Bake the bread until done, ensuring any disagreeable gas is driven off during baking.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour: Forms the batter and dough, providing the structure that holds the bread's shape.
Warm water: Hydrates the flour so fermentation can start and the dough can be mixed and shaped.
New milk: Adds moisture and softness to the crumb when used in place of some water.

The step that matters

Holding the starter at 70°F to 80°F for about 5 hours. Fermentation depends on temperature. Too cool and the batter will not rise with bubbles; too hot and the yeast-like activity can turn sour or stall, so the starter may fail to lift the dough.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.