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Salt Rising Bread

A bread made from sliced potatoes, cornmeal, lard, and sugar, baked after rising.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar 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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Mix the sliced potatoes, salt, and cornmeal with boiling water in a bowl.

  2. Let the mixture stand until foamy.

  3. Pour off the water.

  4. Thicken the mixture with warm flour.

  5. Place the bowl in a pan of warm water.

  6. Let it stand until light.

Mix and bake

  1. Add warm flour, lard, and sugar to the mixture.

  2. Mix until very soft.

  3. Transfer to pans.

  4. Let the dough rise until light.

  5. Bake for 30 minutes.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Starchy pulp that thickens the mixture and keeps the bread moist.
Warm flour
Forms the gluten structure that traps gas and gives the loaf its crumb.
Lard
Adds fat that softens the crumb and tenderizes the texture.
Sugar
Feeds the fermenting yeast and adds mild sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Let the starter stand until foamy. This fermentation step must be active before the flour is added. If the mixture is too cold or the wait is too short, the dough will not rise well and the bread will turn out dense.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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