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Bread

Salt-Rising Bread

A bread made with milk, cornmeal, wheat flour, salt, and water, leavened by sour batter and sponge.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Salt-Rising Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Mix warm milk and cornmeal into a stiff batter.

  2. Let the batter sit at bloom heat until sour.

Make the dough

  1. Dissolve salt in hot water and mix with wheat flour to make a thick sponge.

  2. Knead the sour batter and sponge together thoroughly.

  3. Set the dough in a warm place for several hours until leavened.

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.

  1. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. 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

Wheat flour
Provides the gluten structure that holds the sponge and dough together.
Cornmeal
Adds body and texture to the starter batter.
Warm milk
Adds moisture and helps the starter batter stay soft and workable.

The step that matters

Let the batter sit at bloom heat until sour. Souring depends on warmth. Too cool and the batter stalls, too hot and the culture can die or spoil. Judge by smell and sourness, not just the clock.

“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.

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