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Bread

Salt-rising Bread

A bread made from a stiff batter of boiled milk, meal, water, flour, and lard, left to rise and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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. Thicken boiling milk with meal and keep in a warm place overnight.

  2. Stir in lukewarm water and enough flour to make a stiff batter.

  3. Set the batter in a kettle of warm water to rise for 2 hours.

Make the dough

  1. Mix the risen batter with flour and lard. Knead well.

  2. Place in pans.

  3. Let the dough rise. Bake.

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).

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

Boiling sweet milk
Its warmth and the meal thicken the mixture so the starter can ferment gently.
Meal
Thickens the milk into a starter that holds the wild yeast and bacteria.
Flour
Provides the gluten network that traps gas and gives the loaf its structure.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and softens its texture.

The step that matters

Setting the batter to rise in warm water. The starter depends on a steady, warm temperature to ferment. If it runs too cool, the rise stalls; if too hot, the microbes die or sour the batter excessively.

“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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