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Bread

Salt Rising Bread

A bread made with milk, cornmeal, sugar, salt, baking soda, water, and flour that rises overnight.

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. Heat the milk to boiling point.

  2. Pour the hot milk over the cornmeal, salt, and sugar in a heated pint jar.

  3. Keep the jar in a warm place overnight at an even temperature.

  4. Scald 1 teaspoon sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, and ⅓ teaspoon baking soda with 1 pint hot water.

  5. Cool the mixture with a scant pint of cold water.

  6. Add flour to make a batter thicker than for hot cakes.

  7. Mix in the risen mixture from overnight.

  8. Beat for a few minutes.

Rise and bake

  1. Place the dough in a 10‑pound lard bucket with a tight cover.

  2. Set the bucket in a kettle of hot water.

  3. Keep the bucket as hot as your hand can bear.

  4. Ensure the bucket is free from draughts.

  5. When the dough has doubled in size, add warmed flour.

  6. Shape the dough into loaves.

  7. Let the loaves rise.

  8. Bake the loaves.

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

Milk
Scalds the cornmeal and starts the fermentation that leavens the bread.
Cornmeal
Provides the starch and grain that feed the culture in the starter.
Baking soda
Neutralizes acidity in the scalded mixture, helping the batter rise and brown.
Flour
Builds the batter and then the dough, giving structure to the loaves.

The step that matters

Keep the bucket as hot as your hand can bear. Salt rising bread relies on warm, steady heat for the bacteria that produce gas. Too cool and the dough will not rise; too hot and the culture may be killed.

“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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