What is baking powder, and how is it different from baking soda?

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 it's 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 kind of 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 got to 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 scare monger 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 powder that's toxic you 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 problem see how it Baker's ammonia is you know if you don't work it right your foods gonna taste like urine that's dr. Linda civet ello 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 they 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 live from ash into pearl ash pure potassium carbonate and that worked okay until it was overtaken by the much superior sodium bicarbonate Armand Hammer introduced commercial baking soda in the 1840s and there's 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 do 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 a 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 costs from milk soured with some vinegar because by heard a 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 tartar cream of tartar 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 winemaking but where does the cream and the name come from well here dr. civet ello quotes from a very old cookbook the stuff from the inside of the casks is dissolved in boiling water and drawn off 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 miscellaneous ly tart it's a flavour neutral powdered acid which makes it good for combining with baking soda to leaven anything but there are two problems one cream of tartar is expensive and two when combined with baking soda it reacts instantaneously and then it just stops cream of tartar 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 the 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 people start tinkering on other cheaper acids that also continued to react once the dough or the batter 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 headphones courtesy of the sponsor of this video Kove I have extremely noisy children therefore it's nice that I can shut out the world when it's time to get to work thanks to the active noise cancellation in these cans active noise cancellation uses an acoustical phenomenon called phase cancellation to eliminate outside noise one of the earliest videos on my channel is an explainer on phase cancellation I'll link to that in the 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tartar for their acid simply kind of sucked they were expensive and they didn't create much lift dr. savetti lo says other people kind of stumbled on to 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 nutrients back in and he knew that you could make this acidic product from bones so professor Evan Horsford that was his name he bought up a whole bunch of bones from butcher shops around Boston and he boiled them way down and then he crushed them up and what he got he called Pulver and 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 tartar you take this phosphoric acid and then there's an initial release of gas when it's mixed with water and baking soda this is what cream of tartar based baking powders do as well but the phosphonic baking powder reacts again when it hits 140 Fahrenheit or 60 degrees 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 horse ferd 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 powder with alum that's aluminum sulfates as the acid this was very cheap to make and 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 sour so that 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 crystallized 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 the competitors products as poison in contrast royal said their product was made from grapes it's wholesome its natural but Royals 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 got to put it in right at the very end right before the cake goes in the oven the other set of the ingredients says if you're using a 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 the most 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 loss suits and countersuits continued for decades until a royal finally ran out of gas because their products 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 tartar they never mentioned that the resulting leavener won't work nearly as well they will instead claim that aluminum baking powders will make your breads taste metallic I shouldn't sound so skeptical I've never noticed this but a lot of people say they do so if you do notice some kind of weird taste from an album containing baking powder try getting a baking powder that only has mono calcium 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 to 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 baking powder that only uses calcium phosphates no aluminum sulfates it's a little more expensive and some people say it can taste bitter - all of which may leave you wondering why bother messing with these baking powder products at all why not just do like Grandma Foxx 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 11 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 bit of 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 the baking powder kicks in at 140 Fahrenheit 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 that way the first time I have updated the written recipe in the description of my pancakes video a quart but anyway that's what baking powder is and why you might want to use it instead of or in addition to baking soda

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 941,773

Rating: 4.9377279 out of 5

Keywords: baking soda, baking powder, sodium bicarbonate, baking 101, what is baking soda, bicarbonate of soda, difference between baking soda and baking powder, cream of tartar, alum, aluminum, aluminum-free baking powder, monocalcium pyrophosphate, sodium aluminum sulfate, baking soda and vinegar

Id: _92FaS_0eiE

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/breakers]

Dang that's interesting, I had no clue. Thanks OP!

[u/healthyaz]

Thanks for posting OP. This is a question I’ve always asked but never thought to investigate myself.

[u/mud_tug]

Wow, this channel is a wonderful rabbit hole of chemistry and cooking. I'll be binging that!

[u/IcanSew831]

As a home baker that’s still learning this very much helped my understanding.

[u/IAmSomnolence]

I like this guy, he has got lots of very interesting food related videos.

[u/deepfriedcheddar]

Secret tip: add baking powder to your fried foods batter and they will be extra crunchy and therefor extra delish.