Salt Rising Bread Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

How to Bake Bread like Appalachia's Ancestors

See a recipe for salt rising bread at the bottom of this page.

Salt Rising bread has a long history in Appalachia. Typically, people outside of the region have never heard of it.

The bread often brings to mind a variety of distinctive scents and grandmothers tending to a time-intensive dough in a wood-heated kitchen.

Typically breads require yeast – a leavening agent that makes bread rise, giving it a rounded top. It is what makes it look like bread.

But salt rising bread does not use yeast.

Recipes for the bread date back to the late 1700’s, when pioneer women in the remote mountains of Appalachia figured out another way to make bread – something no one else discovered.

Amy checking the starter. From start-to-finish the whole salt rising bread process can take upwards of 15 hours.

Keeping the Tradition Alive

From her kitchen in Harrison County, West Virginia, chef Amy Dawson explained the bread’s connection to Appalachia’s history. “It was common because we were so isolated. There were no easy ways to get to town. There weren’t brewers to get yeast for your bread. It was just through trial and error and a need to get your bread leavened.”

The bread rises only through the cultivation of bacteria – safe bacteria that is found everywhere. Recipes include milk (or potatoes), heat and time. A lot of time. It takes about 12 hours to make, a process Dawson is now very familiar with.

She recently spent a year studying the art of salt rising bread as part of the West Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Program. She trained under experts Genevieve Bardwell and Susan Ray Brown, the two women who started Rising Creek Bakery in Pennsylvania, which is one of the last places people can buy salt rising bread today.

Although she grew up in Lost Creek, West Virginia, surrounded by salt rising bread, Dawson had never made it before this apprenticeship.

“Growing up I didn’t realize how special it was. I just thought it was something people had everywhere, just a type of bread,” Amy said. “But it wasn’t until I moved home in my 30’s that I realized it was only in this region and that you really couldn’t get it anymore.”

Dawson is also the baker and co-owner of Lost Creek Farm – a traveling farm-to-table kitchen that serves up traditional Appalachian cuisine.

She bakes salt rising bread in her old-farmhouse kitchen, which is perhaps the very same kitchen her ancestor’s baked in.

“My great-grandma Rachel Blake Dawson who grew up in this house made salt rising bread, and she probably learned it from her mom and so I bet a lot of salt rising bread was made in this very house,” she said.

A Twelve Hour Labor of Love

The simplest salt rising bread recipe is just flour and water. But the more ingredients, the more chance for bacteria to grow. So, Dawson hedges her bets.

For her starter, she mixes sliced potato, cornmeal, flour, baking soda and hot water in a quart-sized mason jar. She covers it with plastic wrap and a jar ring. The bacteria need to breathe, so she pokes a hole in the plastic.

“All the recipes say the same thing,” she said. “You put it in a warm place. And then they don’t say anything else about it. But for this particular bacteria that creates the rise in salt rising bread and the fermentation, you need it between 104 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Traditionally, bakers kept their starters on or around their wood stoves.

The sous vide Amy uses to keep a pot of water at a set temperature for her starters. The starters need to sit for eight to 12 hours at 104 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

“In pioneer days the women just knew their fires and knew where to put it overnight and that it would be the right temperature, and it’s amazing they figured it out because that’s a very narrow temperature range.”

Rather than a wood stove Dawson uses a sous vide for temperature accuracy. The sous vide is a curling iron shaped tool that keeps a pot of water at a set temperature.

She set her starters in the heated pot overnight and checks them after eight to 12 hours.

“You want this foam layer on top of your starter,” Amy said.

The starter looks almost white, with flecks of ingredients sitting at the bottom, then a liquid layer and ontop a foam.

“That shows you bacteria is working,” she said. “Those are the air bubbles from the bacteria. You want that that means fermentation is taking place.”

At this stage Dawson takes out the potato slices and adds about half a cup of flour to the starter, but there are no precise measurements. It should somewhat resemble a thin pancake batter.

She lets it sit once more in the heat for 30 minutes or until it has risen to the top of the jar. This is called the ‘sponge stage.’

Dawson says a starter can usually make up to 10 loaves and as little as one.

The sponge stage of the salt rising bread starter. Once the starter is in this stage one can mix it with flour to make a dough.

The starter has an interesting smell, one that has a polarizing reputation. It smells like a strong, aging cheese.

“I don’t want to say decomposing, but you can tell things are breaking down in there, and stuffs getting moving.”

Dawson says she has never heard of the bacteria hurting anyone; however, if the starter does not rise within 12 hours, it is best to throw it out.

To make the dough she mixes the sponge with a teaspoon of salt and a cup of flour per loaf, as well as a splash of hot water.

She kneads the dough and then lets it rise in bread pans in her oven at 104 degrees.

After rising a dough should double in size.

Dawson then heats the oven to 400 degrees and bakes the loaves for 30 minutes.

When all is said and done, the whole process is easily 12-to-15 hours. One begins to think, why not just buy bread from the store? Or just make a quicker bread with yeast? Amy had a good explanation.

“Because it would just be lost. Salt rising bread is such a unique thing. And all these recipes and food heritage, I think it’s really important to keep it – it’s what makes us West Virginian. It’s what makes us unique.”

But What’s With The Name?

The name, salt rising bread, is still a bit of a mystery. Dawson says her mentors Genevieve and Susan have one theory they explain in their book about the bread.

Genevieve Bardwell and Susan Ray Brown’s book. They are masters of salt rising bread, having opened Rising Creek Bakery – one of the last bakeries to sell salt rising bread today.

During an interview with another expert on the bread, Susan and Genevieve ask about saleratus – a precursor to baking soda.

“They asked her about ‘saleratus’ and she said oh, ‘salteritus.’ And they thought just the way she said it ‘salt-er-i-tus’…salt rising.”

That is just one of the several theories on the name.

Taste Test

The loaves come out of the oven and fill the kitchen with a warm, grainy smell. The loaves are a beautiful golden color.

It is best to let them cool before cutting into them.

So Dawson cuts into a loaf she made the night before and buttered the slices and put them on the stove top.

The finished product. Amy’s favorite way to eat salt rising bread is toasted with butter.

She recalls an early memory of her grandmother burning salt rising bread.

“She kept her butter in the fridge. I just remember her scraping cold butter over burnt salt rising bread. It smelled so good. She’s still around but when I accidentally burn some toast I think of her.”

Finally, we get to taste the bread.

It has a lovely, crunchy crust, and each bite makes itself known. Dawson describes it as a “stick to your teeth like chewiness.” It’s uniquely delicious.

This story is part of an episode of Inside Appalachia that explores traditional folkways. To listen to the full episode click here.

**This article was updated on April 1, 2019 at 12:15 p.m. to correct the spelling of “sous vide.”

A salt rising bread recipe from Genevieve Bardwell’s and Susan Ray Brown’s book called “Salt Rising Bread: Recipes and Heartfelt Stories of a Nearly Lost Appalachian Tradition.” Both women mentored Amy during her year of learning how to bake salt rising bread.

Salt Rising Bread: An Appalachian Tradition of Longing and Wild Microbes

Salt Rising Bread is an Appalachian traditional bread made without yeast. It’s a baking custom that can be traced back to the 1800s. But not much has been documented about the bread or its history, so two women in Mt. Morris, Pa., began a quest to understand the hows and whys behind a tradition that seems to captivate anyone who catches wind of it. Bakers Jenny Bardwell and Susan Brown have been researching the bread for 20 years.

The Fascination with Salt Rising Bread:

Brown grew up in Greenbrier County where, every Saturday, she would have salt rising toast and eggs for breakfast with her grandmother. She’s passionate about passing down the tradition.

Brown’s friend Jenny Bardwell was introduced to the custom through a neighbor, the recently deceased Pearl Haynes of Mt. Morris, who made the bread for 90 years.

“I’d go visit her and they were making this bread that I had never heard of and it was a very unique bread—there’s no yeast in it. So I immediately latched on,” Bardwell said.

Bardwell is the owner of the Rising Creek Bakery in Mt. Morris, Pa. She and Brown opened the bakery about five years ago and now it’s one of the only places in the country that produces the product. From the small bakery on the bank of Dunkard Creek in Pa., hundreds of loaves a bread are shipped out each week, including to Shop n Save stores in Fairmont, Clarksburg, and Weston.

Through surveying customers, Bardwell and Brown discovered that, by far, the favorite way to eat the bread is toasted with butter. Others like it dipped in sweet coffee or toasted with milk and brown sugar on top.

Jenny Bardwell on the left and Susan Brown on the right with loaves of Salt Rising Bread

Its History Is a Mystery:

Passed down as an oral tradition, there are few records that hint at its origin. Brown and Bardwell have done some serious research. They’ve even traveled to bakeries abroad looking for connections.

While it’s difficult to draw any definite conclusions, their best guess is that the tradition was born of necessity in remote and isolated Appalachian region in the late 1700s.

“What we’re finding out really is the ingenuity of pioneer women and how they persevered with their cooking,” said Bardwell. “They wanted a loaf of bread so they kind of persevered with this very difficult bread to make.”

Even the name “salt rising bread” is a little mysterious. Brown said it’s really a misnomer because recipes call for very little salt. One possible explanation might have something to do with a wagon wheel. Brown said documentation exists of the pioneer women who crossed the country on the pioneer trails keeping their starters warm in the salt barrel which was kept on top of the wagon wheel.

“And as they traveled across the country during the day, the sun would warm the salt which would in turn warm the starter,” Brown said, “and then they could make their bread in the evening when they stopped traveling.”

How to Make:

Heat is critical ingredient in dough-making. Bardwell compares Salt Rising Bread to Sour Dough Bread, which requires a type of wild yeast.

“Salt Rising Bread is primarily wild bacteria that you’re culturing with heat,” explained Bardwell. “Sour dough happens at room temperature. Salt Rising happens at about 105-115 degrees Fahrenheit.”

There are three phases of salt rising bread: You need to make a starter dough, then grow it, then bake it. You make your starter with potatoes and water and heat… Or milk and cornmeal and heat. (VERY different, right? And yet they create THE same product.)

Then you wait. And watch.

But Bardwell explained that the nature of wild bacteria yields varying results.

“Sometimes it’s nine hours, sometimes it’s eleven hours. You have to be really tuned into this bread. You have to kind of know how to recognize it when it’s ready. Not before, not an hour later,” she said.

Also, depending on which recipe you use, the starters look and smell very different.

“That is another big characteristic of Salt Rising Bread—it smells strong. I kind of like the smell. Some people can’t stand it,” Bardwell said.

Science Lessons:

What makes the starter stink is also what makes the bread rise. To find out more, Brown and Bardwell put their science-caps on and headed to a lab at the University of Pittsburgh to visit pathologist Dr. Bruce McClane.

McClane has made a name for himself studying Clostridium perfringens—one of the wild microbes that makes the “rise” in Salt Rising Bread.

“We walk in and [the lab] smelled just like Salt Rising Bread!” Bardwell said laughing as she remembered the visit.

Bardwell and Brown came to learn from McClane that these microbes can be a pathogenic. They can cause gangrene in human beings or enteritis (diarrhea). But, Bardwell said, no one has ever gotten sick from eating Salt Rising Bread.

Bardwell, Brown, and McClane helped write an article with Dr. Greg Juckett for the West Virginia Medical Journal to highlight how SRB has absolutely no history of causing any disease or discomfort.

In their search for the origin of Salt Rising Bread, Brown and Bardwell did find a couple very similar yeastless breads; in Greece the recipe calls for chickpeas, in the Sudan, there’s a recipe that uses lentils. They also found scientific studies in Turkey and Greece and Sudan on these similar breads—none of which found pathogenic toxins.

It turns out bacteria like Clostridium perfringens are ubiquitous. They’re found all through nature, on the potatoes, in the flour, in the cornmeal. Somehow, Bardwell suspects, a symbiotic relationship between all of these bacteria raise the bread and give it flavor and texture. But the fact that it doesn’t make anyone sick is still kind of a mystery.

Bardwell and Brown really want to find someone who is interested in researching the bread and the wild microbe. They say, they’re willing participants. Their quest continues even as the tradition seems to be face extinction.

A Fading Tradition:

Brown says there are a couple reasons it’s fallen from fashion: the elder keepers of the oral tradition are dying, along with their way of life.

“Salt Rising Bread requires that you are home all day,” Brown said. “You literally cannot leave your house because you have to be so careful to watch each stage and be there when it’s ready.”

But for now, Bardwell and Brown and at least a few others throughout Appalachia still nurture the wild microbial bread.

“One of the goals we had when we started this bakery was we wanted to make Salt Rising Bread and send it to the people who have not had it for years but who pine for it and who really have cherished, beautiful, loving memories of it,” said Brown.

“We have accomplished that and that feels wonderful.”

Salt Rising Bread Recipe #1 – Download as PDF

This recipe comes from an expert Salt Rising Bread baker from Mt. Morris, Pennsylvania, who has been making the bread for 80 years. Her starter, or “raisin,” as she calls it, uses fewer ingredients than most recipes and has no sugar or salt in it.

Ingredients:

3 tsp Corn Meal

1 tsp Flour

1/8 tsp Baking Soda

1/2 cup Scalded Milk

Preparation:

Pour milk onto dry ingredients and stir.

Keep warm overnight until foamy.

After “raisin” has foamed and has a “rotten cheese” smell, in a medium sized bowl, add 2 cups of warm water to mixture, then enough flour (about 1 ½ cup) to make like a thin pancake batter. Stir and let rise again until becomes foamy. This usually takes about 2 hours.

Next, add one cup of warm water for each loaf of bread you want to make, up to 6 loaves (e.g. six cups of water makes six loaves of bread). Add enough flour (20 cups for 6 loaves, or about one 5 pound bag of flour + 1/3 bag). Form into loaves; grease tops of loaves. Let rise in greased pans for several hours, maybe 2-6 hours.

Bake at 300F for 30 to 45 minutes, or until loaves sound hollow when tapped.

(If you want to save some of the “raisin” for the next batch, take one cup of batter out of mixture after you have added the 2 cups of warm water and flour to make a thin pancake batter, and after it has risen the second time.)

For other recipes, visit Suan Brown’s website dedicated to Salt Rising Bread.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVAChVAI_S0

Have a Salt Rising Memory? Share in the comments below!