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Salt Rising Bread

A bread that rises by scalding meal with milk and letting it sit in a warm place before baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Salt Rising Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the starter

  1. Scald 2 tablespoons of meal with new milk and set in a warm place (evening before baking).

  2. Check that the mixture is light in the morning.

  3. Add 1 pint of lukewarm water, a pinch of salt, and 1 teaspoon of sugar to the mixture, then add enough flour to make a batter.

  4. Place the batter in a kettle of warm water to rise, keeping an even temperature.

Make the dough

  1. Bring 1/3 quart of new milk to a boil.

  2. Sift 1 pint of flour into a bowl. Make an opening in the center. Pour in the boiling milk. Stir until it thickens.

  3. Add the remaining quart of milk and the light batter. Mix in 1/2 teacup of melted lard until very soft.

Bake and finish

  1. Divide the mixture into 3 loaves and place in well-greased pans.

  2. Bake for 45 minutes when light.

  3. Grease the tops with butter and return to the oven for a few 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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
Forms the structure of the batter and dough that holds the bread's shape.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and makes the dough very soft.
New milk
Adds moisture and richness, and its boiling thickens the flour mixture into a soft base.
Meal
Seeds the fermentation that makes the starter rise before the dough is made.

The step that matters

Keeping the batter at an even warm temperature while it rises. Salt rising bread relies on a slow fermentation by bacteria rather than yeast. Uneven or cold temperatures slow or stop this rise, 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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