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Bread

Salt-rising Bread

A cornmeal bread that rises with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, 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 cornmeal with the milk and keep warm overnight.

  2. In the morning, mix warm water and coarse sea salt to create a batter.

  3. Stir the cornmeal mixture into the batter and keep warm until it rises.

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, combine scalding water, sugar, and coarse sea salt.

  2. Add enough warm water to achieve the desired dough consistency.

  3. Mix thoroughly and knead well.

Bake

  1. Place the dough in pans and keep warm until it rises.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Cornmeal
Forms the fermenting starter that gives the bread its body and flavour.
Milk
Softens the cornmeal and adds richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Sugar
Feeds the fermentation and adds a little sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Keeping the starter warm until it rises. Salt rising bread gets its lift from fermentation rather than yeast, so the starter must stay warm long enough for bacteria to grow. If it is kept too cool, the dough 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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