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Bread

Salt Rising Bread

A bread made with warm sweet milk, flour, salt, lard, sugar, and baking soda, baked after rising.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

Make the starter

  1. In a bowl, mix warm sweet milk with flour to create a batter.

  2. Place the bowl in warm water (half boiling and half cold) to maintain a warm temperature.

  3. Let the batter rise in a warm place for about 3 to 4 hours until light.

  4. Stir in flour until you have a stiff batter and let it rise again until light.

Shape and bake

  1. Mix the stiff batter with more warm sweet milk or water, salt, lard, white sugar, and a little baking soda.

  2. Mold the mixture into loaves quickly to prevent cooling.

  3. Bake well in a clean atmosphere.

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).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Flour
Forms the batter and dough structure that holds the loaves together as they rise.
Warm sweet milk
Provides moisture and liquid that hydrates the flour and keeps the dough workable.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture of the loaves.
White sugar
Feeds fermentation and adds mild sweetness and browning to the crust.
Baking soda
Reacts with acid in the batter to add a little extra lift and rising.

The step that matters

Let the batter rise until light before adding the rest. The starter's fermentation builds the gas and flavor the dough depends on. Under-rising leaves the loaves dense, while the warm, steady temperature keeps the fermentation working evenly.

“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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