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Bread

Salt Rising Bread

A bread made with milk, cornmeal, hot water, salt, sugar, and flour, risen in hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Salt Rising Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Scald the milk and stir in corn meal to thicken.

  2. Set the mixture in a warm place overnight.

  3. In the morning, scald the sponge with hot water.

Make the dough

  1. Mix in corn meal, salt, and sugar.

  2. Add enough flour to make a thick batter.

  3. Let it rise in hot water for an hour.

  4. Knead the dough.

  5. Place the dough into baking pans.

Bake

  1. Bake 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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. 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

Milk
Scalded to form the starter, adding moisture and milk solids for a tender crumb.
Corn meal
Thickens the starter and adds a grainy texture and mild corn flavor to the bread.
Flour
Builds the gluten structure that holds the batter and dough together and gives the loaf its shape.
Sugar
Feeds the fermentation and contributes sweetness and browning in the crust.

The step that matters

Overnight warm sponge. The starter must stay warm long enough to ferment slowly. If it cools too much, the sponge will not rise and the bread will be dense.

“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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