Name: Salt Rising Bread
Ingredients: 3 teacupfuls of warm water (as warm as you can bear your finger in); ¾ teaspoon coarse sea salt; flour (enough to make a stiff batter, approximately 8 quarts); 1 quart of warm water (same temperature as the rising)

Salt Rising Bread

Ingredients

3 teacupfuls of warm water (as warm as you can bear your finger in)
¾ teaspoon coarse sea salt
flour (enough to make a stiff batter, approximately 8 quarts)
1 quart of warm water (same temperature as the rising)

Directions

Make the rising

Combine warm water and coarse sea salt in a two-quart bowl, then stir in flour to create a stiff batter for the rising.
Cover the bowl and place it in a kettle of warm water, maintaining the temperature.
Wait 3 hours, then stir in 2 tablespoons of flour.
Wait 5.5 hours.

Make the sponge and dough

When the mixture is nearly at the top of the bowl, make a sponge in the center of the flour with 1 quart of warm water.
Stir the rising into the sponge.
Cover the mixture with a little dry flour and keep it warm.
Wait 45 minutes.
Mix the mixture into a stiff dough, being careful not to overwork it.

Shape and bake

Shape the loaves slightly larger.
Let the loaves rise for another 45 minutes.
Preheat your oven to a hotter temperature than for yeast bread.
Bake until the bread is white with a light brown crust.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour: Forms the stiff batter and dough that give the loaves their structure.
Warm water: Hydrates the flour and keeps the rising active at a steady warm temperature.
Rising: Supplies the fermenting culture that leavens the dough, so the bread rises without yeast.

The step that matters

Keeping the rising warm. The fermentation that leavens this bread is temperature-sensitive. If the rising gets too cool it slows sharply, and if it gets too hot the culture can sour or die, so the bowl should stay in a steadily warm water bath.

“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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Salt Rising Bread