Salt Rising Bread: Recipes and Heartfelt Stories of a Nearly Lost Appalachian Tradition by Genevieve Bardwell & Susan Ray Brown

Author:Genevieve Bardwell & Susan Ray Brown [Bardwell, Genevieve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Lynn's Press
Published: 2016-07-06T22:00:00+00:00

[Jenny] What intrigued us about Barb’s recipe was the lack of cornmeal in it and the long time it takes her starter to ferment. At the bakery, our original potato starter recipe included cornmeal. The starter usually fermented in 8 to 10 hours. We found that when we omit the cornmeal, the starter will take 1 to 2 hours longer to work.

This past year, we struggled to find a reliable cornmeal. For a while, we tried field corn from Jackson’s Mill, West Virginia, that was freshly ground just before we purchased it. Later, we bought field corn from a local farmer and ground it ourselves. This made a starter that would be ready in 9 hours or less! But, the farmer’s corn eventually went to feed his cows by the end of March, so we had to find a new source. Since Susan’s grandmother always used store-bought cornmeal successfully in her starters, we tried cornmeal from Krogers, and it worked well, with the starters taking an hour or two longer to ferment than the freshly-ground field corn had. It was after our visit with Barb Morris that we had an aha! moment. We don’t need to put cornmeal in our starter! Now, we regularly leave cornmeal out of our starters at the bakery.

The Salt in Salt Rising Bread

Over the years, we have learned so much from the bread-baking elders of this region of Appalachia, who have helped us unlock the mysteries of our favorite bread. This one has to do with salt – the type of salt you use in your starter.

One ingredient that is often common in salt rising bread starters is some type of salt. The salt can be common table salt (NaCl) or it can be a type of chemical salt, such as baking soda or saleratus (see glossary and page 40). Please note in our potato recipe (page 48) that baking soda is used. In Chapter 3, we told why we switched from table salt to baking soda for our starters at the bakery, in order to increase the “salt rising bread smell.”

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