Home › Bread-Making › Salt-Rising Bread
Salt-Rising Bread
The leaven for this bread is prepared thus: Take a pint of warm water-about 90°-(if a little too hot defeat is certain) in a perfectly clean bowl and stir up a thick batter, adding only a tea-spoon of salt; a thorough beating of the batter is important. Set in a pan of warm water to secure uniformity of temperature, and in two to four hours it will begin to rise. The rising is much more sure if coarse flour or "shorts" is used instead of fine flour. When your "rising" is nearly light enough, take a pint of milk and a pint of boiling water, (a table-spoon of lime water added is good, and often prevents souring), mix the sponge in the bread-pan, and when cooled to about milk-warm, stir in the rising. The sponge thus made will be light in two to four hours, with good warmth. The dough requires less kneading than yeast-raised dough. The bread is simpler, but not so certain of rising, and you leave out all the ingredients save the flour, water (milk is not essential), and a pinch of salt. It should be made more frequently as it dries faster than bread containing potatoes. Some object to it because of the odor in rising, which is the result of acetous fermentation, but the more of that the more sure you are of having sweet bread when baked.-Mrs. H. Young,
Salt-rising bread is raised by wild bacteria rather than yeast, so temperature control is the whole game. Nothing else in the method is difficult, and nothing else will save it if the leaven never wakes up.
- Hold the heat, and hold it steadilyThis is the hinge. The recipe says 90F; modern salt-rising bakers generally hold the starter warmer, often somewhere around 100F to 115F, using a turned-off oven with the light on, a proofing box, or the original's pan of warm water refreshed as it cools. Too cool and it stalls; too hot and the organisms are killed, which is what the author's own warning about water "a little too hot" is about.
- "Shorts"Shorts are the coarse mill fraction of bran and germ left after the fine flour is sifted out. Stone-ground whole wheat flour or coarse unbleached flour is the nearest substitute, and the advice is sound: the microbes that raise this bread travel on the outer layers of the grain, so bleached all-purpose flour alone often fails. Many traditional versions start with scalded cornmeal for the same reason.
- Lime waterA saturated solution of calcium hydroxide (pickling lime), once kept in many kitchens as a mild alkali. It buffers the acid the fermentation produces. It is optional here and can simply be left out.
- "A thick batter"Genuinely unspecified. Add flour to the pint of water until you have a thick but still pourable batter, nearer pancake batter than dough; the quantity has to be judged by eye.
- Timing is a range, not a promiseTwo to four hours for the leaven is optimistic; six to twelve is common, and the sponge stage can run just as long. Look for a foamy, domed surface and a sharp cheesy smell rather than watching the clock.
- The smellThe author is right that the pungency is a good sign, though it is generally attributed to bacterial fermentation yielding lactic and butyric acid rather than strictly "acetous" (acetic) fermentation. Some of the sharpness mellows in baking, but the loaf keeps a distinctive tangy, cheesy note, with a very fine, close crumb.
- BakingNo oven is specified. A moderate oven, around 350F, for 35 to 45 minutes suits loaves of this size; the crumb is dense, and an internal temperature of about 200F indicates it is baked through.
- Yield and keepingA pint of milk plus a pint of water makes enough sponge for two standard loaves. The warning about staling is accurate — there is no potato, fat or sugar to hold moisture, so eat it within a day or two, or toast it, which is how it is usually preferred anyway.
Salt-rising bread belongs to the Appalachian and Ohio Valley uplands, where it was widely made through the nineteenth century and survives in pockets of West Virginia and Kentucky today. The name is sometimes explained by the practice of setting the batter to ferment in a bed of warmed salt, or in a crock nested in salt, to hold an even temperature, with the salt as incubator rather than leaven; but this is traditional explanation rather than documented origin, and other accounts of the name circulate. Its appeal in a book like this one was practical: a housekeeper without reliable access to brewer's yeast, and without a dependable potato-yeast pot going, could raise bread from flour, water and warmth alone. Commercial compressed yeast, sold from the 1870s onward, made the method unnecessary rather than unloved, and it faded into a regional specialty. The rise is now understood to come from bacteria carried on the grain rather than from yeasts, which is why the loaf has no yeasty aroma and why, as Mrs. Young concedes, it is "not so certain of rising."