Albert Bryce Hanner

Taming the Wild Yeast Albert Bryce Hanner

Grandma Grigg wrote in 1963 "Our water source, on the ranch was from a boxed in spring at the far end of a large garden there, at the spring was water cress, and with mother's salt rising bread and butter, good cold milk, is one moment to remember." Grandma explained how you used salt to get the "risin'" but could not really get to the reason why that was so. As I became a budding biologist, I remembered this explanation and doubted that salt had anything to do with it. Digging deeper into the salt-rising bread phenomenon, it turns out Grandma was, to some extent, correct. By the time I knew my grandparents in the 1950s, Grandma was no longer making salt-rising bread but would buy it for Grandpa in the rare bakeries here and there that still made it. My mother and her five brothers and sisters all raved about it and they, too, would buy it at first opportunity until they were no longer able to find it after about 1960. Some four decades later, I decided to learn how to make it applying a bit more science than ritual to the process. Despite the change of process, I must have hit the nail on the head as gauged by the reaction of my Grigg family aunts and uncles who can consume several loaves at a time given enough access to a toaster and some butter. My recipe is the centerpiece of this book.