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Bread

Salt Rising Bread

A bread made by mixing milk, flour, and salt, allowing it to rise, then baking loaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Salt Rising Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Start the culture

  1. Stir ½ cup flour and 1 teaspoon salt into 1 pint of milk.

  2. Pour the mixture into a bottle.

  3. Place the bottle in warm water.

  4. Let it sit until it becomes light.

Make and bake the bread

  1. Add lukewarm water.

  2. Stir in enough flour to form a dough.

  3. Shape the dough into loaves.

  4. Let the loaves rise.

  5. Bake the loaves.

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 + 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

Milk
Provides the liquid and nutrients that the starter ferments to make the bread rise.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and holds the loaves' shape.

The step that matters

Let the starter sit in warm water until it becomes light. The starter relies on warm conditions for its fermentation microbes to grow and produce gas. If it is too hot, the microbes can be killed, and if it is too cold, fermentation stalls and the bread will not rise well.

“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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