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Bread

Salt-rising Bread

A bread made with flour, water, lard, salt, and raw Irish potato slices that rises in a warm place.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,355 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Salt-rising Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the starter

  1. Combine warm water, meal, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add 5 tablespoons of flour and the potato slices; set aside in a warm place to rise.

  3. Around 11 o'clock, stir in a little more flour.

  4. Remove the potato slices before adding the rising mixture to the remaining flour.

Make and shape the dough

  1. In a large bowl, mix 5 pints of flour, 3 tablespoons of lard, and 1 teaspoon of salt.

  2. If the dough is too dry, add warm water until soft.

  3. Knead the dough well and shape it into rolls or loaves.

  4. Grease the baking pans and the top of the dough with lard to keep it soft.

  5. Place the dough in a warm area to rise until doubled in size.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden brown.

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 + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure and crumb.
Warm water
Hydrates the flour and dissolves the starter so the dough becomes soft and workable.
Lard
Adds fat for tenderness and keeps the crumb soft.
Raw irish potato
Provides starch and nutrients that feed the fermenting starter culture.

The step that matters

Keep the starter warm while it rises. Salt rising bread relies on warmth-loving bacteria to ferment the starter without yeast. If the mixture gets too cold, fermentation stalls and the dough will not rise properly.

“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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