hey it's Danny here reporting to you
from the woods and we just got done with
an early morning bike rack we are hungry
but I have a question for you though
what do you think is the most important
thing in making these flapjacks well
tell you one thing it's not the steel
pan he could have cooked these babies on
a hot flat rock I'll tell you what it is
it's the baking powder that's right and
to understand why baking powder and the
chemists who invented it are so cool
we're going to delve into a little
history of bread throughout history
bread fed armies built nations and
fueled exploration around the world
but there were a few hiccups along the
way around 1500 BC Egyptian Baker's
discovered that yeast growing an old
dough or sour dough made the dough rise
that was huge it made bread soft it made
it taste good but most importantly it
made bread last so now people could
survive cycles of feast or famine
because they had bread to carry them
through Baker's use fermented sour dough
or yeast for leavening for 3,000 years
but yeast with all its benefits isn't
the easiest thing to work with
yeast is a living organism a fungus that
can be finicky for yeast to grow and
convert the sugars in dough to carbon
dioxide bubbles that make the bread rise
the conditions have to be just right the
yeast has to be cultured kept warm then
wait for it to produce enough gas
bubbles to make the bread rise who had
time for that
then chemistry revolutionised baking
with something called quick breads this
was the first time in history that
people didn't have to carry around a
living organism to make their bread
that's so old-school
in the 1830s Baker's began adding sodium
bicarbonate and sour milk to their dope
lactic acid and the sour milk reacted
with the sodium bicarbonate to produce
carbon dioxide bubbles in the dough that
made it rise but Baker's never knew how
sour the milk was so they couldn't
predict or control the reaction chemists
came up with a temporary solution in the
1840s they combined cream of tarter a
byproduct of wine fermentation with
sodium bicarbonate combining two
chemicals solved the problem of
unpredictable results but cream of
tarter was expensive and sometimes hard
to find enter Harvard chemist Edmund
forsberg in Ventura baking powder I
replaced cream of tarter with calcium
acid phosphate
I call it mono calcium phosphate my
early source for calcium was cattle
bones which we treated with sulfuric
acid it wasn't easy to make plus Baker
still had to mix two reactants so I
solved the problem by drying the
ingredients and added corn starch as the
vital third ingredient to keep the
powder dry and keep it from reacting
with the moisture within the can voila
baking powder
in the late 1880s people mined for
calcium phosphate which eliminated the
need for decades
baking powder contained the same three
ingredients calcium acid phosphate
sodium bicarbonate and cornstarch
Evon Horace Bert was a chemical pioneer
who changed the face of baking his
baking powder made baking easier quicker
and more reliable chemistry was the key
to making quick breads and thanks to an
American chemist
we solved the age-old problem of using
finicky yeast his solution using
chemistry finally made baking
cost-effective dependable and it changed
the way Baker's baked in kitchens and
bakeries across the nation who knew
there was so much chemistry behind
baking powder which is another great
reason to never stop exploring your
world
so 1840