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Bread

Salt Rising Bread

A bread made by mixing boiling water, salt, sugar, flour, lard, and letting it rise in warm water before baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Salt Rising Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the starter

  1. Combine boiling water, salt, sugar, and enough flour to make a batter. Beat the batter well.

  2. Set the batter in a kettle of warm water to rise until light.

Make and bake the dough

  1. Mix the risen batter with additional flour and a little warm water. Add lard and a pinch of salt.

  2. Knead and mold the dough. Let the dough rise.

  3. Bake the dough in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Provides the gluten and starch that give the bread its structure.
Boiling water
Scalds the flour and starts the batter fermenting for a light crumb.
Sugar
Feeds the fermenting batter and adds a little sweetness and browning.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.

The step that matters

Set the batter in warm water to rise until light. Salt rising bread relies on wild bacteria fermenting the batter instead of yeast. Too cool and the batter won't rise; too hot and it can sour or die off, so the warm water must stay steady while the batter lightens.

“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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