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Bread

Salt Rising Bread

A bread made by mixing milk, water, salt, sugar, and flour, allowing it to rise before baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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. In the morning, combine 1 pint of new milk with warm water until quite warm.

  2. Add a pinch of salt and a little sugar, then thicken with flour to a pancake batter consistency.

  3. Place the mixture in a quart pitcher or a large vessel and set it in a kettle of warm water, keeping it slightly warmer than lukewarm.

  4. After about an hour, if water settles on top, add a little more flour.

Make the dough and bake

  1. Once the mixture is perfectly light, add 2-3 quarts of flour, a little salt, and enough warm water or milk and water to form a dough.

  2. Place the dough in a greased pan and keep it warm until it rises.

  3. Bake until done, which will take about six hours for the yeast to rise and about one hour for the bread to bake.

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

New milk
Provides moisture and milk sugars that feed the fermentation and contribute to a soft crumb.
Flour
Forms the batter and then the dough, giving the bread its structure.
Sugar
Gives the fermenting mixture a readily available food source and adds a little sweetness.

The step that matters

Keeping the starter warm and judging when it is light. The starter ferments best when slightly warmer than lukewarm, held steady in a warm water bath. If it gets too cool, fermentation slows and it will not rise properly. Wait until it is perfectly light before adding the rest of the flour, so the dough has enough leavening to lift well.

“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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