What even is baking powder? And why isn't it baking soda? Well, it is.
Maybe a third of the content of this can is sodium bicarbonate — baking soda — a base,
an alkaline ingredient. As quite a few primary school science students can tell you, when
you combine a base like sodium bicarb with an acid like vinegar, a chemical reaction
ensues that creates carbon dioxide gas. And if you mix some red food coloring with the
acid, the resulting stream of bubbles will look kinda like lava and you'll get a ribbon
at the science fair, but that's not important right now.
What is important is that that's what baking soda is. It's just an alkali. Baking powder
is baking soda plus an acid right there in the can, also in powdered form. There's also
a "buffer" like cornstarch in there to absorb water from the air and keep the acid and base
from reacting prematurely.
Then all you gotta do is add water and you get the same CO2-creating reaction that we
see in the science fair volcano. And this reaction is used to inflate bubbles in breads
and cookies and cakes, so that they bake tall and soft and fluffy instead of being flat
and hard and dense.
So that's the short answer to WTF is baking powder. The answer gets longer and more interesting
when you start to consider what particular kind of acid is in here. Disputes over what
kind of acid is best led to one of the longest and ugliest industrial disputes in American
history.
It was a fight that involved corporate espionage, crooked politicians, shockingly false scaremonger
advertising, and a lawsuit that they tried to take to the Supreme Court. And it's a fight
that goes on to this day right here on the internet whenever some earthy-crunchy clutches
their pearls about "aluminum in baking power — that's toxic, ya know."
No, it's not really, though the forerunners of modern chemical leaveners were toxic: Things
like lye made from wood ashes, or even ammonia. Yes, baker's ammonia is a thing. They ground
it from deer horn.
"The problems, yeah, with baker's ammonia is, you know, if you don't work it right,
your food's gonna taste like urine."
That's Dr. Linda Civitello, food historian and author of "Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat
Food Fight That Revolutionized Cooking." She says bakers have always been desperate for
an alternative to yeast, which is fickle and hard to work with — so desperate in fact
that were willing to try making bread with ammonia that smelled like pee.
"So, that's not an easy thing to recover from. It's not like you can say, 'I'll just put
a little jam on this, or a little frosting, to cover it up."
The problem is that there are very few strongly alkaline substances that aren't at least somewhat
toxic. We have evolved to find their tastes and smells repulsive, to keep us from eating
poisons.
For centuries, though, people have been able to refine lye from ash into peal ash — pure
potassium carbonate. That worked OK until it was overtaken by the much superior sodium
bicarbonate. Arm & Hammer introduced commercial baking soda in the 1840s and they're still
the leading producer today.
Now, you may be thinking, "Hey wait, but this is just a base. You need an acid to react
with the base to create gas. How did people bake with just this?"
Well, a ton of foods that we eat are naturally acidic — chocolate, fruits, fermented dairy
products. A lot of old cake recipes simply rely on the combination of baking soda and
milk that has gone sour to create gas.
This is my maternal grandmother's chocolate cake recipe: Grandma Fox's cake. It calls
for milk soured with some vinegar, because by her day, naturally soured milk would have
been a rare thing thanks to refrigeration, but the concept is the same.
Indeed, if you see a baking recipe today that only calls for baking soda and not baking
powder, that's probably because the other ingredients are acidic enough. All they need
is a base to neutralize.
It was in the second half of the 19th century when industrialists in both Europe and America
started selling baking soda in combination with an acid, and the first acid many of them
turned to was cream of tarter.
Cream of tarter is made from these acidic crystals that form on the inside of wine casks.
Tartaric acid naturally occurs inside grapes.
So this stuff is a byproduct of wine-making, but where does the "cream" in the name come
from? Well, here Dr. Civitello quotes from a very old cookbook: the stuff from the inside
of the casks is "dissolved in boiling water and drawn into copper tanks. As the solution
cools, a thick crust forms over the entire surface, which is taken off like cream from
the surface of milk." Then it is dried into a powder, and that powder tastes like ... just
miscellaneously tart.
It's a flavor-neutral powdered acid, which makes it good for combining with baking soda
to leaven anything. But there are two problems: 1) Cream of tarter is expensive, and 2) When
combined with baking soda it reacts instantaneously, and then it just stops.
"Creme of tarter also reacted with liquid in the bowl, and you see the early cookbooks
say, 'Get it in the oven immediately, and if it doesn't work at first, keep trying..."
... because if you move too slowly, the bubbles will pop in the bowl before they can raise
the cake or the bread or whatever in the oven.
So, around the same time in the 19th century, other people start tinkering on other, cheaper
acids that also continue to react once the dough or the batter or whatever hits the heat.
That's what's known as "double acting" baking powders. And the threat that double-acting
baking powders posed to the old single-acting baking powder industry is what resulted in
the baking powder wars.
Oh, hey, you caught me editing myself again. I was just listening on my fancy new noise-cancelling
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from Kove. Thank you, Kove. Now, what was I saying about baking powder?
So early baking powders that relied on cream of tarter for their acid kinda sucked. They
were expensive, and they didn't create much lift. Dr. Civitello says other people kinda
stumbled on some better alternatives.
"Yes, the first patent is from in the 1850s, is from a Harvard professor of chemistry,
and he was concerned that nutrients were being removed from flour. Even then, we're talking
about 170 years ago, people are concerned about the nutrition in bread, and he wanted
to put nutrient back in. And he knew that you could make this acidic product from bones."
So professor Eben Horsford — that was his name — he bought up a whole bunch of bones
from butcher shops around Boston, and then he boiled them way down, and then he crushed
them up, and what he got he called "pulverulent phosphoric acid." It didn't really make bread
more nutritious, but it did react with baking soda to make gas, and it did it way better
than cream of tarter.
You take this phosphoric acid, and there's an initial release of gas when it's mixed
with water and baking soda. This is what cream-of-tarter-based baking powders do as well. But the phosphatic
baking powder reacts again when it hits 140 F or 60 C. That's what "double-acting" means.
This second rise makes the product way more effective. You don't have to rush your cake
into the oven. And it gives the cake a boost of volume right when it needs it, when the
cake is still liquid enough that it can expand, but it's not solid enough yet to support itself.
Horsford eventually figured out how to make this stuff without boiling down animal bones,
and the result is Rumford Baking Powder, which is still around today.
Also in the late 19th century, a few guys in the American midwest figured out that you
could make baking power with "alum" — that's aluminum sulphates as the acid. This was very
cheap to make, it was double acting and very effective. One such product was made in Terre
Haute, Indiana, and named Clabber Girl.
Clabber is an old word for the technique of letting milk go sour so you can use it as
a leavening acid — remember that?
Baking powder exploded into a huge industry, simply because it saved people so much time
in the kitchen. And this is a fact that you can see crystalized in this nauseatingly racist
advertisement — it's saying that having baking powder working for you in your kitchen
is just as good as enslaving a human being and having him work for you in your kitchen.
And the rise of cheaper, more effective double-acting baking powders was an enormous threat to the
Royal Baking Powder Corporation of the United States, which was the leading manufacturer
of cream-of-tarter-based, single-acting baking powders.
"By the 1870s, Royal Baking Powder realized that there was a tremendous amount of competition,
and they started what is one of the most brilliant advertising campaigns of all time, which is
not just promoting their own product, but characterizing their competitor's products
as poison."
In contrast, Royal said their product was made from grapes — it's wholesome, it's
natural. But Royal's product was demonstrably inferior — to the point where cookbooks
in the first half of the 20th century often have two sets of ingredients: one set of ingredients
if you're using single-acting baking powder, AKA Royal. Use two teaspoons of that, and
you've gotta put it in right at the very end, right before the cake goes in the oven. The
other set of ingredients says, if you're using double-acting baking powder, you can just
use one teaspoon, and you can put it in whenever you want. As a result, Royal naturally started
to keep losing market share, so they thought they would try to get their competitors banned.
"They want to start a grassroots movement, with individual states outlawing the alum
baking powders. They can't convince the state legislature to do this, but they go to Missouri,
which has a reputation as a robber state and one of the most corrupt states in the country,
and they bribe the legislature. They just flat-out pay the Missouri Senate to pass a
law saying that alum is toxic and can't be used."
Lawsuits and countersuits continued for decades until Royal finally ran out of gas, because
their product simply made less gas.
But to this day, there are still people writing articles in food magazines and on websites
saying, "Hey, you can make your own aluminum-free baking powder at home by mixing baking soda
and cream of tarter." They never mention that the resulting leavener won't work as well.
They will instead claim that aluminum baking powders will make your bread taste metallic.
Now, I shouldn't sound so skeptical. I've never noticed this, but a lot of people say
they do. So if you notice some kind of weird taste from an alum-containing baking powder,
try getting a baking powder that only has monocalicium phosphate as the acid inside
it. Rumford is the one. This is the stuff that the Harvard professor originally boiled
out of bones.
Even an alum baking powder like Clabber Girl uses phosphates too for the early phase of
the lift. But if you really don't want the aluminum at all, you can get this from Rumford,
which is also now owned by Clabber Girl. This is a double-acting powder that only uses calcium
phosphates, no aluminum sulphates. It's a little more expensive, and some people say
it can taste bitter too.
All of which may leave you wondering: Why bother messing with these baking powder products
at all? Why not just do like Grandma Fox did and combine baking soda with a naturally acidic
ingredient. Well, that's what I thought when I was writing the recipe for my buttermilk
pancakes, featured in an earlier video. These are leavened with baking soda and the acid
in buttermilk, but I couldn't help but notice when I shot that video that my pancakes were
still a little flat.
So I tried doing what a lot of recipes tell you to do, which is put in a little baking
soda to neutralize the acidic ingredients, and then some baking powder, and watch what
happens. That batter is super bubbly right away — that's the room temperature reaction
that happens in water. Then they go on the griddle, and then that's when the double action
of baking powder kicks in at 140 F 60 C. They get a second rise, right when their structure
is about to set from liquid to solid, and look how much fluffier the resulting pancakes
are. This is a better recipe with baking powder in it as well, and I'm sorry that I didn't
give it to you the first time. I have updated the written recipe in the description of my
pancakes video accordingly.
But anyway, that's what baking powder is, and why you might want to use it instead of,
or in addition to, baking soda.