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Bread

Salt Rising Bread

A bread made by fermenting a salt and water batter overnight, then mixing with milk and flour to form a dough.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sponge

  1. Pour boiling water into a two-quart pail or pitcher and add the salt.

  2. When the water is cool enough to touch, add flour to make a thick batter.

  3. Beat vigorously until full of air bubbles.

  4. Cover and place in a pan of warm water, letting it sit overnight.

  5. Check that the sponge is light and has a peculiar odor.

Make the dough

  1. Mix the sponge with the scalded milk and enough flour to make a batter that drops from a spoon.

  2. Beat until smooth.

  3. Cover and set in a warm place until light.

  4. Add flour to make a dough.

  5. Mold thoroughly.

  6. Shape into loaves.

Bake

  1. Bake when very light.

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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk 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 traps gas and sets into the crumb.
Scalded milk
Adds moisture and softness to the dough and enriches the crumb.
Sponge (in the method)
Starter that ferments overnight, creating the gas that leavens the loaves.

The step that matters

Check the sponge before adding milk. The overnight sponge must be light, bubbly and smelling distinctly fermented before it is used. Under-fermented starter will not leaven the dough well, so the loaves may come out 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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