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Bread

Salt-rising Bread

A bread made by mixing middlings, sugar, salt, baking soda, and boiling water, then letting it rise overnight before baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Salt-rising Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Mix the middlings, sugar, salt, and baking soda in a coffee cup.

  2. Pour boiling water into the mixture.

  3. Stir the mixture until nearly full.

  4. Cover the cup.

  5. Set the cup in a warm place overnight.

Make the dough

  1. In the morning, place flour in a bread pan.

  2. Add salt to the flour.

  3. Pour in 1 quart of boiling water.

  4. Stir the mixture slowly.

  5. Add enough cold water or milk until the mixture is bearable to touch.

  6. Stir in the middlings.

  7. Cover the mixture with flour.

  8. Set the mixture in a warm place.

  9. When risen, shape into loaves.

Bake

  1. Grease the pans and tops.

  2. Cut deep gashes across the loaves for even rising.

  3. Bake on low flame for 45 minutes.

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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 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

Middlings
Provides the starch and grain that the fermentation works on to raise the bread.
Sugar
Feeds the fermenting microbes, helping the starter become active and gas-producing.
Baking soda
Raises the starter's alkalinity and adds a small early lift to the batter.
Flour
Forms the gluten structure that holds the gas bubbles and gives the loaf its crumb.

The step that matters

Warm rising of the starter overnight. The starter needs a steady warm temperature to ferment well. If it is too cold, fermentation stalls and the bread will not rise properly.

“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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