Home › Recipes › Salt Rising Bread
Salt Rising Bread
Salt rising bread may be made by gelatinizing corn meal with boiling milk and adding a small amount of salt and soda to this mush, allowing it to stand from ten to twelve hours. After the mush has fermented the required length of time, the water, soda and flour are added in sufficient quantities to make a stiff sponge. This sponge is allowed to ferment from 1/2 to 2 hours, when more water, flour, salt, sugar and shortening are added. Following is a formula for Salt Rising Bread:
Fine corn méal, 4 ozs.
Salt, 8 ozs.
Shortening, 12 ozs.
Soda, 12 oz.
Sugar, 12 ozs.
Milk, 1 qt.
Water, 19 lbs.
Flour, 30 lbs.
Method Bring the milk to a boil, remove from the fire and stir in the corn meal, 1/4 oz. salt and 1/4 oz. of bicarbonate of soda. Put this mush in a warm place where it will be possible to maintain a temperature of 100 to 110 degrees from ten to twelve hours. After the ferment has stood the required length of time add 4 lbs. of water, 14 oz. of soda and about 7 lbs. of flour and mix to a firm sponge. Allow this sponge to ferment from 1¼ to 2 hours. Dough After the sponge has fermented the required length of time, add 12 lbs. of water, 1 lb. of sugar, balance of salt, shortening and 23 lbs. of flour, mix, then divide into loaves immediately. It is advisable not to allow the dough to lie more than ten to fifteen minutes after it is mixed, nor is it advisable to make very large batches of the bread if facilities for moulding the bread quickly are not at hand. It should not require over 20 minutes to mould up the entire batch.
This is a bakery formula written for a 30-lb sack of flour, and it works on a principle no other bread in the book uses: there is no yeast anywhere in it. Everything below follows from that.
- The hinge: speed after mixingA salt-rising ferment is bacterial, not yeast-driven, and it collapses if the dough is left standing. The original is emphatic — divide immediately, mould the whole batch inside twenty minutes, and get it into pans to proof. There is no bulk fermentation step and adding one will ruin the loaves.
- Scaling it downDivide everything by twenty for a home batch: 1/5 oz cornmeal (about a rounded teaspoon), 3 tbsp milk, about 1 lb 8 oz flour, 2/5 oz salt, scant 1 oz sugar and shortening. The water is uncertain: the list says 19 lbs but the method uses 4 lbs plus 12 lbs, so a twentieth is somewhere between 12 and 15 oz. Working the ferment that small is awkward; dividing by ten and making two loaves is more practical.
- Garbled fractionsThe ingredient list still reads "Soda, 12 oz" and "Sugar, 12 ozs," neither of which squares with the method, which calls for 1/4 oz of soda in the mush, a little more in the sponge, and 1 lb of sugar in the dough. Read the soda quantities as fractions of an ounce and the sugar as 1 lb; the "14 oz. of soda" in the sponge is likewise a fraction.
- Holding 100–110°F for twelve hoursThis is the whole difficulty. An oven with only the light on, a bread proofer, a sous-vide bath with the jar standing in it, or a cooler with jugs of warm water will all hold the range. Below about 95°F the ferment stalls; much above 115°F it dies.
- Gelatinizing the mealFine cornmeal only; a coarse grind is less likely to gelatinize properly in a quart of milk. Bring the milk fully to the boil, take it off the heat, then rain the meal in while stirring so it thickens without lumps. The soda is generally understood to keep the mush from turning simply sour, which is thought to favour the gas-producing bacteria over the lactic ones.
- How to tell it has workedA ripe ferment smells sharply cheesy, almost like unwashed feet, and shows a foamy head with bubbles rising when tapped. That smell is correct and bakes out into the loaf's characteristic tang. A ferment that only smells sour, with no gas, has failed and no amount of extra time will save it.
- Baking, which the formula omitsProof the panned loaves warm until roughly doubled — often two to four hours, considerably slower than yeast bread — then bake at 400–425°F for 30 to 40 minutes, to an internal 200–210°F. The crumb is dense and close-grained by nature, not by fault.
- YieldThe full formula makes somewhere around 50 lb of dough, depending on how the garbled water figure is read, or roughly thirty to thirty-five 1 1/2-lb loaves.
Salt-rising bread is an Appalachian and upland Southern tradition, recorded in American household books from the nineteenth century onward and generally traced to frontier households that had no reliable supply of brewer's yeast. Its leavening comes from bacteria carried in on the cornmeal rather than from Saccharomyces — older accounts identify Clostridium perfringens, while more recent work points to Bacillus and related species — which is why the ferment must be held blood-warm and why the finished loaf has a fine, tight crumb and a pungent, cheese-like aroma quite unlike yeast bread. The name is sometimes explained as a reference to a bed of hot salt used to keep the starter jar warm overnight, but this is folk explanation rather than documented etymology; the salt in the formula plays no part in raising it. Its appearance here, translated into a commercial 30-lb formula with a warning about mould-up time, suggests a bakery trade adapting a stubbornly domestic bread for customers who still asked for it by name.