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Salt-rising Bread

A bread made by fermenting a batter of milk, water, salt, brown sugar, and flour, then baking after rising.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA steady oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Scald a quart of milk in a pitcher.

  2. Fill the pitcher one-third full with warm water.

  3. Add salt, brown sugar, and enough flour to make a batter similar to pancake batter.

  4. Place the batter in a closed vessel half-filled with moderately hot water.

  5. Keep the temperature even.

  6. Add a teaspoon of flour once or twice during fermentation.

  7. Fermentation should take about five hours.

Make the sponge

  1. Sift flour into a pan.

  2. Make an opening in the center of the pan.

  3. Pour the rising into the opening.

  4. Add a quart of warm salted milk or milk and water.

  5. Cover the sponge.

  6. Keep the mixture warm for an hour.

Shape and bake

  1. Knead the mixture into loaves.

  2. Place the loaves in well-greased pans.

  3. Cover the pans.

  4. Let the loaves rise until light.

  5. Bake in a steady oven.

  6. Let steam escape.

  7. Wrap the bread in a damp cloth.

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
Forms the batter and sponge that give the bread its structure once baked.
Milk
Adds richness and moisture, and its sugars help the crumb brown lightly.
Brown sugar
Provides a small amount of food for the fermenting culture, adding a touch of sweetness.
Salt
Controls the fermentation pace and adds flavor to the dough.

The step that matters

Keeping the starter temperature even. Salt rising bread relies on slow fermentation by naturally occurring bacteria rather than yeast. Temperature swings can stall or spoil the culture, so the starter needs steady warmth for about five hours before the sponge is made.

“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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