It Would Seem This Bread Could Kill You
But it makes delicious toast
I’ve had nary a scrap of bread on my plate for over a week. It weighs upon my body and my soul. My future looks uncertain.
I’m not lost on a remote mountain or enduring the hardships of an early American wagon train. I’m at home in my kitchen in North Carolina, trying to make one goddamn decent loaf of salt-rising bread.
This bread — which makes absolutely delicious buttered toast—happens to have originated during pioneering days in Appalachia. It spread westward across the frontier all the way to California (for what it’s worth, it’s mentioned in the Little House books).
It’s remarkable because it uses absolutely no yeast, which wasn’t readily available back then. Nor does it employ yeast like levain and sourdough do. Instead, fermentation generated by the bacteria Clostridium perfringens is coaxed for hours at a low temperature (90 to 100 degrees) from a formula that typically involves a mixture of sugar and cornmeal and scalded milk — a new and genuinely American way of making bread rise.
My kitchen grows a lot of bacteria, so this idea doesn’t bother me at all. And the bakers who have been baking salt rising all their lives obviously see Clostridium perfringens as a friend rather than a foe.
