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Salt Rising Bread

A bread made by fermenting a salt and sugar mixture with flour, then baking until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the starter

  1. Combine warm water, coarse sea salt, and sugar in a bowl until thick like pancake batter.

  2. Place the bowl in warm water and let it sit for 3 hours until bubbles form on the surface.

  3. Thicken the mixture with flour until it reaches the original thickness.

  4. Let the mixture sit for another 3 hours.

  5. Scald 1 pint of flour and let it cool.

Make the dough

  1. Mix the cooled flour with the risen batter and enough warm water to form a stiff dough.

  2. Knead the dough on a warm surface until smooth.

  3. Place the dough in a baking pan.

  4. Let the dough rise until doubled in size.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°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. 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

Flour
Forms the bulk of the dough and sets the structure once baked.
Warm water
Hydrates the flour and keeps the batter and dough moist and workable.
Sugar
Feeds the fermentation that makes the starter bubble and rise.

The step that matters

Keeping the starter warm while it sits. Salt rising bread relies on warm-temperature fermentation to develop bubbles and leavening gas. If the starter gets too cold, it stalls and the bread 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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