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Bread

Salt-rising Bread

A bread made with milk, meal, flour, salt, lard, and sugar that rises and is baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the starter

  1. Scald the milk briefly and beat it well.

  2. Wrap the mixture to keep it warm and free from air.

  3. In the morning, check the meal; it should be light and ready to rise.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, make a sponge with the prepared meal.

  2. Stir in sifted flour, salt, lard, and sugar.

  3. Mold the mixture into loaves and let them rise for about an hour.

Bake

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C) and bake the loaves for one hour.

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).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Milk
Provides the liquid and nutrients that feed the fermenting starter culture.
Meal
Supplies the starch and microbes that ferment to leaven the bread.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the loaves structure and chew.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens its texture.
Sugar
Feeds the fermentation and adds sweetness and browning in the crust.

The step that matters

Checking the meal in the morning. The starter must be light and bubbly before use. If it has not fermented enough, the loaves will not rise well, and over-fermenting can leave a sour, 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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