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Bread

Milk, or Salt Rising Bread

A leavened bread made by fermenting a thin batter of water, milk, and flour, then baking a soft dough.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Milk, or Salt Rising Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. In a pitcher, mix warm water (or water and new milk) with enough flour to make a thin batter.

  2. Place the pitcher in a kettle of warm water, maintaining a temperature of 70°F to 80°F.

  3. Cover the pitcher with a saucer and let it sit for about 5 hours until it begins to rise with fine bubbles.

Make and bake the bread

  1. Add 1 quart of water and a little more salt, then mix in flour to form a soft dough.

  2. Transfer the dough into 8 brick-shaped baking tins and let it rise until nearly doubled in size.

  3. Bake the bread until done, ensuring any disagreeable gas is driven off during baking.

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).

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
Forms the batter and dough structure that traps gas and sets into the crumb when baked.
Warm water
Hydrates the flour and gives the starter a warm medium where fermentation can begin.
New milk
Adds milk sugars and proteins that feed fermentation and contribute softness and browning.
Coarse sea salt
Controls fermentation speed and adds flavor to the dough.

The step that matters

Keeping the starter warm. The starter must stay within 70°F to 80°F so the fermentation that produces rising bubbles proceeds steadily. Temperatures much lower slow fermentation, while much higher favor unwanted bacteria that spoil the bread.

“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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