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Salt-Rising Bread (No. 2)
(Over Night) The night before you contemplate baking this bread, take½ cup cornmeal and a pinch of salt and sugar. Scald with new milk heated to boiling point, and mix to the thickness of mush. This can be made in a cup. Wrap in a clean cup and put in a warm place overnight. In the morning, when all is ready, take a one-gallon stone jar and into this put 1 scant cup new milk.
Add a level teaspoon salt and one of sugar.
Scald with 3 cups of water heated to boiling point. Reduce to a temperature of 108 degrees with cold water, using a thermometer to enable you to get the correct temperature. Then add Five Roses flour and mix to a good batter. After the batter is made, mix in the starter that was made the night before.
Cover the stone jar with a plate, put the jar in a large kettle of water, and keep this water at a temperature of 108 degrees until the sponge rises. It should rise at least 1½ inches. When raised, mix to a stiff dough. Make into loaves and put into pans.
Do not let the heat get out of the dough while working. Grease your loaves on top and set your bread where it will be warm and rise satisfactorily. Then bake in a medium oven, one hour and ten minutes.
On removing from oven, wrap the loaves in a bread cloth. -Mrs. H. Johnson, Kindersley, Sask.
A working recipe, but an unusual one: salt-rising bread is leavened by a bacterial ferment raised on cornmeal rather than by yeast, and it depends almost entirely on holding a narrow temperature. The original gives no flour quantity, so expect to judge by feel.
- The hinge: 108F, heldThe starter and sponge must sit close to 108F (42C) for the whole rise; below about 100F it stalls, and much above 115F it dies. A turned-off oven with the light on, a proofing box, or the kettle-of-water bath the recipe describes all work, but check the water with a thermometer and top it up warm as it cools.
- New milk"New milk" is fresh whole milk, straight from the cow. Whole pasteurized milk is fine. In the starter the milk is heated to boiling before use; in the sponge the milk is scalded by having boiling water poured over it.
- Flour is unmeasuredThe recipe says only "add Five Roses flour and mix to a good batter," then later "mix to a stiff dough." With roughly 4 cups of liquid in the jar, the batter stage takes somewhere near 3 cups of bread or all-purpose flour, and the final dough another 5 to 7. Work to consistency, not to a number.
- CornmealUse plain stone-ground or degerminated yellow cornmeal, not a self-rising cornmeal mix and not corn flour. Coarser meal is often said to ferment more reliably than very fine.
- Oven temperatureA "medium oven" is usually read as somewhere around 350F (175C). An hour and ten minutes suits two large loaves in tins; check for an internal temperature of about 200F rather than trusting the clock.
- The smellA healthy salt-rising sponge smells sharply cheesy, almost of old socks. That is the expected result of this particular ferment, not spoilage. If the sponge instead goes slimy, pink, or does not rise at all in 6 to 8 hours, discard it and begin again.
- TimingAllow the full day the recipe implies: overnight for the cornmeal starter, then 4 to 8 hours for the sponge at 108F, plus a final proof of the shaped loaves in a warm spot. This bread will not be hurried and will not wait.
- Yield and keepingThe quantities should give two or three loaves, depending on tin size. Wrapping the hot loaves in a cloth, as directed, softens the crust as it cools; the crumb is close and fine and makes good toast.
Salt-rising bread is an American frontier bread, associated particularly with Appalachia, western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley, where it is generally traced to households that had no reliable supply of brewer's or baker's yeast. Its leavening comes not from yeast at all but from bacteria present on the grain, which produce gas and the bread's distinctive pungent tang; the name is often said to refer to the practice of nesting the fermenting jar in a bed of heated salt to hold it warm overnight, though other explanations circulate. That this Canadian promotional cookbook prints two versions, and that this one comes from a reader in Kindersley, Saskatchewan, suggests something about how the technique traveled north and west with settlers. The insistence on a thermometer and a precise 108 degrees is a notably modern touch for a bread that was elsewhere judged by hand.