Salt Rising Bread

A week or so I tried a starter for salt rising bread and it didn’t work. The starter is stirred together on the evening before the bread is made. The next day, the dough has to be made, kneaded, let rest, kneaded more, shaped into loaves, let rise for 1-1/2 to 3 hours, and then baked so really, I needed to plan ahead and make the starter on an evening when I was going to be home all day. Finally, yesterday, knowing I’d be home all day today, I stirred up the starter.

This dough smells so bad and the kitchen smells so bad while it’s baking but I don’t think the bread smells that bad. Maybe by then, my sense of smell has given up and I don’t notice it. Some people say it smells like stinky socks. I think it smells like stinky cheese. Vince loves stinky cheese and I remember when Chad was at his worst years as far as being very uncooperative, I think Vince got stinky cheese out every night at dinner just to get Chad going. We really do need to open the windows for some of the cheeses Vince likes.

According to this blog post, I started making salt rising bread in 2003 so I’ve been making it almost 20 years.

Here was Vince making salt rising bread which is weird on several counts. First, that was at the house in town in Kentucky and Vince never liked staying at that house so I can’t imagine that he stayed there to make the starter and bake the bread the next day and second, that’s probably the first and last time Vince has ever made bread. I can about guess that he wanted it and I said . . you make it!

How ancient does that picture look with a phone on the wall? 2003 . . probably way more people had them than have them now.

I’ve tried quite a few recipes through the years but I always come back to this one. I cut it down a bit and made two loaves instead of three today.

You can see by the butter knife on the left that, even without yeast or any added leavening agent, the bread rises up nicely.

I fixed lunch earlier than normal because Vince had to go to town and will probably be gone at least three hours. I told him the salt rising bread would be ready this afternoon and we can have toasted cheese sandwiches for dinner! Wish we homemade tomato soup to go with them. Maybe I’ll go make that too.

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