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Bread

Salt Raising Bread

A bread made by fermenting a milk and cornmeal mixture, then baking it in a jar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Salt Raising Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Heat the milk just to boiling, then pour it over the cornmeal in a small bowl and beat well.

  2. Cover the bowl and let it sit in a warm place overnight.

  3. In the morning, add salt and sugar to the mixture and beat well.

  4. In a small stone jar, combine warm milk (or part water) and the cornmeal mixture, thickening with sifted flour until it resembles sponge cake batter.

  5. Place the jar in an iron kettle filled with warm water, ensuring the water level matches the mixture height.

  6. Keep the kettle filled with hot water to maintain temperature for a couple of hours until the mixture rises.

Make the dough

  1. Prepare a pan of sifted flour and rub in the butter.

  2. When the mixture is ready, pour it into the flour, rinse the jar with warm milk, and mix everything together, adding more milk and flour as needed to make the desired quantity of bread.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Milk
Provides liquid that hydrates the cornmeal and flour to form a batter and dough.
Cornmeal
Gives the starter body and feeds the fermentation that makes the bread rise.
Sifted flour
Thickens the starter to a batter and builds the structure of the dough.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and a small food source for fermentation.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and gives a richer flavor.

The step that matters

Keeping the kettle hot for the rise. The starter must stay warm for hours so its fermentation stays active. If the temperature drops, the mixture will not rise and the bread will be dense.

“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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