BBD39: Salt rising bread

This month's Bread Baking Day (#39) challenged us to make a salt-rising bread. There is no yeast to fall back on for this bread, which was a bit scary.


Our hostess was the lovely lady at easier than pie.


I used a recipe from Bernard Clayton's book, The Complete Book of Breads.

First, I created a preferment from cornmeal, milk, and sugar. While the recipe said this would take about 10 hours to become foamy, mine took about 24 hours. Since timing was off (10 pm), I took a gamble and refrigerated the preferment over night. This, apparently, did no harm.


For the next step, flour, salt, baking soda, and the preferment were combined and allowed to get bubbly. Once again, this took more time than the recipe indicated, so I placed the dough into the fridge over night, expecting the worst in the morning.



Surprisingly, the dough had actually risen quite a bit during its big chill. So, I warmed it to room temperature, then formed it into two loaves. After the dough had doubled, I baked it.





I was amazed that this process actually worked! The one drawback was that the fermented dough had a really funky odor. It continued as a background note in the baked bread, but not enough to make it unappealing to eat. In fact, it was really delicious toasted with butter and jam.


Alisa will be posting the roundup around the 6th of May, so do take a look at the other salt rising breads.