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Salt Rising Bread

A bread that rises by fermentation of flour and water, baked in buttered tins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Salt Rising Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Pour hot water into a two-quart pitcher, add coarse sea salt and 1⅓ pints of flour, and mix well.

  2. Place the pitcher in a kettle of warm water.

  3. Keep it at the same temperature until the batter doubles in size (5 to 8 hours), stirring the batter once or twice during rising.

Make the dough

  1. Combine the batter with 1 quart of hot water.

  2. Add 2½ quarts of flour, adding more flour as needed to form a soft dough, and mix well.

  3. Let rise in a warm place until light.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into loaves and place them in buttered tins.

  2. Prick the loaves.

  3. 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Provides the structure that holds the bread's shape as its gluten network forms and sets in the oven.
Hot water
Hydrates the flour so gluten can form, and keeps the batter warm enough to ferment.

The step that matters

Holding the batter at steady warmth. The batter must stay at one steady, warm temperature while it rises. Fermentation slows when the batter cools and can turn sour or stall if it gets too hot, so the rise can fail or go off-flavour.

“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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