The first time I experienced salt rising bread was in the wilds of West Virginia, as a delicious grilled-cheese sandwich. This Appalachian bread tradition does not use yeast. Instead, ground corn and flour supports a bacterial fermentation that produces gas to raise the dough and provide a delicious cheesy funk flavor that is not found in yeast risen breads. I’ve spent the last thirty years researching this bread and the other rare yeast-free bread traditions that exist in just a few places around the world.
This is the Appalachian region of the United States where salt rising bread was invented. It is mountainous and back in the 1700's, people were isolated. They did not have access to yeast from beer making. Plus, keeping a sourdough culture alive was cumbersome without fridges.
Most of the early recipes use cornmeal and some type of salt, like potash or saleratus. Even table salt will work in the starter.
Back in the day, women really knew their fires, and they knew right where the temperature was not too hot, just warm enough.
Nowadays, the best way to keep the salt rising starter warm is with a Sous Vide, which is what I use.
I find the best temperature is at 40C (104F). See RECIPE.
Or you can use your InstaPot on the yogurt setting. Make a water bath in the pot, push the button for yogurt, then set the time for 14 hours. Place your jar in the water bath and cover only with a towel (NOT the lid). See RECIPE.
It may take several attempts to successfully make salt rising bread, as the process is not intuitive. I have examined hundreds of recipes, and it is obvious the steps were handed down through oral communication. After decades of feeding salt rising bread to our families, and producing it commercially, my colleague, Susan R. Brown and I pursued finding out which microbes were involved in this unique fermentation. We teamed up with scientists at the University of Pittsburgh, who identified the wild bacteria as a progression of Bacillus spp., Clostridium spp., and Lactobacillus spp. that reproduced in this order over a ten-hour period. These scientists determined there were no toxins produced from these bacteria and more significantly, there were no genes in the bacterial DNA to produce toxins. Here is the article, Microbiology of Salt rising bread, in the West Virginia Medical Journal.
As I was one of the authors of the scientific article that shared these results about the health benefits of Salt Rising Bread, I became familiar with identical fermentations in other traditional breads on the other side of the world. See GERGOUSH (from Sudan), KARAHOYUK (from Turkiye), EFTAZYMO (from Greece), ARCATENA (from Cyprus), , and SOETSUURDEEG (from South Africa).
References for Salt Rising Bread
Bardwell, G. and S.R. Brown. 2016. Salt rising bread. St. Lynn’s Press, Pittsburgh.
Brown, S.R., G. Bardwell. 2015. Salt Rising Bread. Pg. 154-162 in Handbook of Indigenous Foods Involving Alkaline Fermentation (Eds. Sarkar, P.K. and Nout, M.J.R.). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group.
Juckett, G. , Bardwell, G., McClane, B., Brown, S. 2008. Microbiology of Salt rising bread. West Virginia Medical Journal. 104: 26-27.