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Bread

Salt Rising Bread

A bread made with a stiff batter of cornmeal, milk, sugar, and salt that rises overnight and is baked after kneading with water, sugar, lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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. In a bowl, stir cornmeal, pinch of salt, and sugar into hot milk.

  2. Let it stand overnight until it puffs up.

  3. Pour 1 teaspoon sugar and 1 cup hot water over the mixture.

  4. When cool, stir in the overnight mixture and enough flour to make a stiff batter.

  5. Beat well and set in a warm place.

  6. It should rise in about one hour.

Make the dough and bake

  1. In a large bowl, combine 1 cup water, ½ cup sugar, ½ cup lard, and 1 scant tablespoon salt.

  2. Add the risen mixture and enough flour to knead without sticking.

  3. Place the dough in pans, keep warm, and bake when light.

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. Sugar + flourtop 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

Flour
Builds the gluten network that gives the loaf its structure and chew.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens the texture.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and food for the fermentation that makes the batter rise.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, and helps soften the crumb.

The step that matters

Keep the starter warm while it rises. This starter relies on warm-temperature fermentation to rise. If it is kept too cool, the rise slows or fails, so the dough will be dense and under-risen.

“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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