Baking powder: What Is It?
Baking powder is a dual-purpose chemical leavener that blends powdered acid
(tartaric acid) with powdered alkali (sodium bicarbonate). Cookies, cakes and
pancakes inflate due to a chemical reaction that occurs when they are wet in a
dough or batter and create carbon dioxide gas. Baking powder acts as a
combination of an acid and a base, thus it may react with milk or even water
instead of requiring additional ingredients to activate the sodium bicarbonate,
like buttermilk or sour cream.
Baking powder did not become an instant commercial hit since people at home
could accomplish the exact same thing using baking soda and cream of tartar
long before the internet existed.
Manufacturers reduced the cost of baking powder by substituting costly
tartaric acid, an imported byproduct of winemaking, with monocalcium phosphate,
which is made locally from calcium and phosphorus. This allowed the product to
be more reasonably priced than do-it-yourself alternatives.
Still, the 1890s saw the introduction of "double-acting" recipes by
businesses that included sodium aluminium sulphate, which is when baking powder
really took off. This insoluble crystalline powder is naturally acidic, but it
will not combine with sodium bicarbonate until it is completely melted,
therefore no reaction can occur until it is heated to a temperature over 140°F.
Why then utilise two acids? The moisture-sensitive acid in double-acting
formulations is supposed to seed the dough with carbon dioxide, priming it
rather than leavingning it. Then, just
when cakes and cookies are most in need of it—roughly halfway through baking,
when delicately set batters and doughs are on the verge of collapsing—the
heat-sensitive acid takes effect.
Avoid Causing Trouble With DIY Baking Powder
That one-two punch is what makes baking powder these days so powerful, and the
reason I don't advise making your own at home. Completely better than nothing
at all, but these "single-acting" baking powders release 75% of their
carbon dioxide content before they ever get to the oven, according to the
Handbook of Food Products Manufacturing.
Nevertheless, cookies are far more forgiving than cakes, partly due to the fact
that the relatively low moisture content of cookies inhibits the actual
interaction between sodium bicarbonate and acid until the butter melts (which
is why cookie dough is glad to sit in the refrigerator).
There's
no need to worry when using double-acting formulations; in the worst situation,
the first carbon dioxide dose is thrown out, but the second dose arrives at the
oven ready to start.
Single-acting baking powders are practically out of style, unless there's some
kind of cookie crisis that requires you to MacGyver (or MacGruber) your way
through a recipe. The "double-acting" element of baking powder should
be obvious when making cookies.
How Much Baking Powder Is Necessary for My Cookies?
Depending on how long the cookies bake, or how long the carbon dioxide supply
has to last, a recipe's precise amount will vary. For thin, crispy cookies, use
a bit less flour than for thick, chewy cookies; around one teaspoon for every
five ounces of flour is needed.
A well-aerated dough will still puff with steam even without the baking powder. In the event that the supply is shut off before the cookies solidify, the soft dough will crumble. The air pockets are kept as the final result if it goes on till the
Crumb of a cookie.
Baking powder only increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the mixture,
creating a stronger pressure that promotes dough to expand upward and outward.
In the absence of the fully formed elasticity found in bread dough, the gluten
strands in cookies would break rather than expand, causing surface cracking.
That's what gives cookies their well-known look, but those fissures will only
get deeper if you continue to press the dough with additional carbon dioxide.
You can observe from this set of images that the cookies tend to rise
slightly more—but only to a certain extent—when we add the baking powder. Eventually,
the reaction will get so strong and violent that the air pockets will actually
rupture and collapse, making the cookie denser and more compact.
Therefore, unlike what many people think, a cookie does not get cakey by using
too much baking powder. All that baking powder does is control the expansion of
air cells; gluten determines whether or not a dough can withstand this
expansion. Gluten formation is favoured in recipes that are lean, rich in
moisture, low in sugar, and somewhat acidic. Rich, somewhat alkaline,
high-sugar, and low-moisture recipes do not work well. There's no way that
baking powder can fix it.
A dough will taste strange if you pack it with more chemicals than it can burn off in a certain amount of time.
The Brand Doesn't Matter When Using Baking Powder
It doesn't really matter what brand of double-acting baking powder you use.
While different firms may employ varying combinations of starches, alkalis, and
acids, and some may provide different certifications (gluten-free, kosher,
etc.), all of their products are designed to a somewhat similar extent to cause
a two-stage reaction.
Clabber Girl is what they offer at Sam's Club, my one-stop chemical store, so I
keep it at home but I owe it no special devotion. I assume it's tested and
true, since it has the same combination of chemicals that made baking powder
popular 120 years ago.
Remember that the purpose of the
components in baking powder is to initiate a chemical reaction when comparing
labels. Those components don't make it into the finished product, unless
something goes wrong. For instance, sodium aluminium sulphate cannot be tasted
in cookies since it is absent: Aluminium hydroxide, an odourless mineral,
carbon dioxide, sodium, and water are the products of its reaction with sodium
bicarbonate. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide, water, and trisodium pyrophosphate—an
acid that is naturally bitter—are produced by sodium acid pyrophosphate, which
is marketed as a more flavorful substitute.
Keep your baking powder dry and cool.
Whichever variety you select, keep your baking powder in a dry, cold area.
Though the shelf life of most packages is six months, there's little risk of
receiving tainted powder.
Baking
powder's main components, sodium bicarbonate and cornflour, are incredibly
stable even under harsh storage circumstances, and its primary acid is
determined by its incapacity to react with water. It is theoretically possible
to activate the moisture-sensitive acid too soon, but it would result in the
creation of liquid water, which would cause the cornflour to physically cake, clump,
and pill.
Untrustworthy Cookies? Most Likely Not the Baking Powder's Problem
My own view is that the actual reason tried-and-true recipes don't turn out
well occasionally isn't enough aeration, which can be caused by under-creaming
or too soft butter.
Look at this: the baking powder content of the two sugar cookies above is
exactly the same.
Instead
of creaming the sugar, I used a stand mixer to whisk room-temperature butter
for the batch on the left. I creamed cool butter and sugar until light and
fluffy, making the batch on the right.
My sugar biscuits swelled out light, thanks to careful creaming that included
innumerable small pockets of air for the carbon dioxide to grow. The carbon
dioxide just sprang out of the dough in unsightly wormholes as there was no
aeration to give it a footing. Are those shadowy areas visible?
It would be simple to assign the blame for "bad" baking powder if you
were unaware of the significance of creaming or the fact that soft butter does
not hold air. So, rather than discarding a perfectly fine tin.
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