Semi-Failure: Salt Rising Bread

Not an unqualified success, as you can see.

I've had a long-time fascination with bread recipes that are leavened not with commercial yeast but with homemade "starters", of which there are many kinds. Perhaps six to eight times I've attempted to bake such breads and at no time have I ever been entirely happy with the results, with perhaps one exception.

Making a starter completely from scratch is a bit like culturing microbes, only in the kitchen. A growth medium is prepared and incubated, usually at elevated temperature, for a day or more until naturally occurring yeasts or bacteria are seen to have colonized the medium; then it's added to the bread dough in place of commercial yeast. From what I've seen there are two main classes of bread starter: the sourdough starter, incubated at room temperature or somewhat above, which contains both yeast and Lactobacillus that gives the bread its characteristic lactic-acid sourness; and the more fascinating "salt-rising" starter, incubated at a higher temperature, which tends to suppress the growth of yeasts and favors the growth of such bacteria as Clostridium perfringens. These give salt-rising breads a unique cheesy aroma and taste.

I've tried a number of salt-rising starter recipes from different sources. The recipes from The Joy of Cooking (1975 edition, of course, the last good edition) use a large amount of salt in the starter, which I thought was necessary to help suppress yeast growth. Indeed I thought that's why it's called "salt-rising". Apparently I'm wrong, though; in any case I've come across salt-rising starter recipes using no salt. Instead, "salt-rising" probably refers to an old Appalachian practice of using lumps of rock salt, heated and then set aside to cool slowly, to keep the starter hot enough to incubate the bacterial culture. This is the chief difficulty with salt-rising starters: they need to be kept at a fairly constant 100 °F for a day or more. In earlier experiments I tried using an electric oven set on "warm" but with the door propped open so that the oven can't get very hot inside; this did not work well at all and was horribly wasteful of heat in any case. Then I tried an improved water-bath, incubating the starter in a container immersed in water kept warm in a saucepan over the stove. This gave better results. Here in a different apartment, however, I found out by accident that if I leave the oven closed and off but with the light inside left on, it will in about an hour reach a steady temperature of 95-100 °F. I can't promise though that this will be true of every oven.

The recipe I used here is slightly modified from Bernard Clayton Jr.'s The Complete Book of Breads (1973) but, since things started going wrong rather early, I'm not going to give a set of ingredients and directions. Instead I'm going to tell a little story about what happens when a recipe goes awry.

1. The starter itself was made by mixing ½ cup of whole milk, scalded first in a saucepan, with 2 heaping tablespoons of stone-ground polenta. I'm not sure if "stone-ground" is necessary but I suspect that it might be, since you're relying on naturally occurring bacteria to grow and these are less likely to be found in a more highly processed corn meal. In any case, I put the mixture in a small bowl, covered it with cling wrap, and put it in the 95-100 °F oven for about twelve hours. At the end of this time the mixture was frothy and had a strong yoghurt-like smell--just what you want.

2. When using a starter, the next step is to use it in preparing a "sponge", which is a fairly fluid batter containing only a fraction, perhaps half at most, of the total amount of flour to be used in the recipe. This mixture is allowed to sit in a warm place until it's very light and bubbly, and only then is more flour added. So in the bowl of my stand mixer I combined 2 cups of boiling water with 1 teaspoon of white sugar, 1 teaspoon of kosher salt and 1 teaspoon of baking soda (an odd ingredient for a naturally-risen bread but that what's in the recipe), then added ⅓ cup of gluten flour and 2 cups of all-purpose flour (the original recipe calls for 2½ cups of bread flour.) This was supposed to produce a smooth batter. This did not happen. Instead I got, well, bread dough--rather sticky still but definitely not fluid at all, not suitable for preparing a sponge.

3. In desperation I added about ⅓ cup of warm water and started mixing vigorously, but really once a dough forms you can't really thin it back down to a batter by adding liquid. All I did was make the dough stickier and even less tractable. In any case, I gave up on trying to make it fluid, and just added the still-warm starter, kneading it in as best I could, then covered the bowl and placed it back in the 95-100 °F oven for about two hours. If things had gone correctly, I should have gotten a very light and frothy sponge. Instead I got a modestly risen dough.

4. Back under the stand mixer I added about five tablespoons of softened lard--yes, I do keep lard on hand--and kneaded it in with the bread hook. The original recipe at this point calls now for kneading in "the rest of the flour" for a total of about seven to eight cups. Instead I added barely more than another cup of all-purpose flour before the dough lost its stickiness, for a total of maybe four cups. The original recipe was supposed to yield enough dough for two loaves; instead I had enough for one. So I tossed it into a loaf pan--well greased with cooking oil and sprinkled with corn meal--to rise in the warm oven.

5. I was expecting that the dough wouldn't even rise much. That's how most of my starter-risen breads have done: the dough rises a little but runs out of puff well before doubling in volume, then bakes into a hopelessly dense and heavy loaf. This time, though, I was surprised to see that the dough doubled in volume within an hour. Might as well bake it, right? I did, at 375 °F for about 40 minutes, which maybe wasn't enough. As you can see in this picture the loaf split in two during baking and was still dense and doughy in the center when I sliced into it after thorough cooling. But I still got a few decent slices off the ends, not too heavy and with a subtle but still distinct cheesy flavor.

I probably will try this recipe again but use either more liquid than called for, or using not more than a cup of flour at the start to make the sponge.