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Why You Should Use Aluminum-Free Baking Powder (per David Lebovitz)
One of the least expensive, and most effective, things you can do to improve the taste of your cakes, quick breads, cookies, and muffins is to switch to aluminum-free baking powder right away.
Baking powder a leavening agent, and it’s usually called for in recipes where there are alkaline (as opposed to acidic) ingredients. In actuality, baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) is one of the ingredients in baking powder, which, when moistened, releases carbon dioxide, which causes baked goods to rise.
If you’ve ever experienced a bitter, “tinny” flavor when biting into a muffin, that’s because of the baking powder used—and often the overuse of it.
The most popular brand is Rumford, named after Count Rumford, although there are likely others. (If anyone knows one that’s sold in small, airtight containers, I’d be interested in knowing about it. Leave any info the comments.) Oddly, it’s made by the same company that makes Clabber Girl baking powder. Baking powders without aluminum cost just a couple of cents more than standard baking powder, and the flavor of your baked goods will improve substantially.
You can also make your own single-acting baking powder: for 1 teaspoon of baking powder, mix 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar with 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda and 1/4 teaspoon cornstarch. This can be scaled up or down, proportionally. Or you can make a little jar of it, not too much, and use it as needed. If you do make your own baking powder, be sure to pop whatever you’re making right in the oven after it’s mixed as it’ll start to react once you’ve added the liquid to your muffin or quick bread recipe.
Baking powder can lose its oomph and doesn’t last forever. To prevent that, buy the smallest container you can find and store it with the cap firmly in place in a cool, dry place…but not the refrigerator, whose air is too moist. Although I’m always looking for ways to cut down on excess packaging, I find it best not to buy baking powder that’s sold in bulk, as it sometimes is at health food stores, since it loses its vigor quickly when exposed to humidity in the air.
When in doubt if your baking powder is still good, add a teaspoonful to a half cup of boiling water. If it boils vigorously, the baking powder is still good. If nothing happens, chuck it.
ATK:
The formulas used to make baking powders today are much more carefully calibrated than when this leavener was first packaged for home cooks nearly 200 years ago, but the chemistry remains the same. Baking powders depend on the inclination of an alkaline substance (sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda) and an acid (originally cream of tartar, but today there are more options) to react and produce carbon dioxide gas bubbles, thereby leavening batters for muffins, cakes, and other baked goods that need a quicker rise than can be provided by yeast.
Baking soda has always been a pretty good buy, while cream of tartar, a byproduct of wine making, has never come cheap. It was first used in prepared baking powders in 1835, but by the 1850s a cheaper alternative, monocalcium phosphate (MCP), was introduced, and it continues to be used in baking powders today. MCP is similar to cream of tartar in that it reacts with baking soda immediately when the two are combined with water. (Cornstarch is a component of all baking powders. It absorbs moisture, thereby helping to keep the acid and the baking soda from interacting during storage; it also helps to disperse the acid and baking soda evenly throughout a batter.) What this immediate reaction means in professional baker's terms is that MCP gives a batter more bench rise (the leavening that takes place before a batter goes into the oven) than oven rise (the leavening that takes place in the oven). This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does require the cook to get the batter into the oven fairly quickly; if not, the baking powder will exhaust much of its leavening power on the bench, and the muffin or cake will not rise as much as it could or should in the oven.
Enter the acidic leavener sodium aluminum sulfate (SAS), added to many baking powders since the beginning of the 20th century. SAS and a compound used interchangeably with it today, sodium aluminum phosphate (SALP), don't react with baking soda and water at room temperature. It's only in the oven, when the temperature rises above 120 degrees Fahrenheit, that their leavening power goes to work. Several top-selling brands of baking powder make use of both MCP and one of the aluminum compounds as a kind of insurance so the home cook gets both good bench rise and good oven rise. (Another popular brand uses only MCP with no aluminum compounds.) The MCP goes to work as soon as liquid is added to the dry ingredients, and the SAS or SALP kicks in when exposed to the heat of the oven. In most such formulations, about one-third of the leavening takes place on the bench and the balance in the oven. These baking powders are all referred to as double-acting, in reference to the fact that the leavening action takes place twice-once outside the oven, once inside the oven.
Does any of this make any difference in the kitchen? To answer this question, we made biscuits, scones, and yellow cake with the aluminum-free brand and baking powders containing SAS or SALP. We then compared the results. Both types of baking powders performed well in terms of creating a good rise; thus, the brands containing aluminum do not guarantee more oven rise as long as the mixed batter made with aluminum-free baking powder isn't left to sit around before baking. The other issue is taste. Critics of baking powders containing SAS or SALP state that these compounds give baked goods a slight but unpleasant metallic flavor. A couple of our tasters could indeed detect a very slight metallic flavor in each baked good made with the baking powders containing aluminum, but most tasters could not discern a difference.
The answer? Aluminum-free baking powders work just as well as brands made with aluminum compounds. If you have a keen palate that is highly sensitive to metallic flavors or if you wish to limit your ingestion of aluminum, choose an aluminum-free powder
http://www.food52.com/blog/3130_on_chemical_leaveners
A lot of Hotline conversations begin with questions about the way cakes, cookies, muffins and the like rise (or fall). From general inquires like "Why didn't my cake rise?" to much more specific calls for help, the topic arises again and again. So this week we're talking about chemical leaveners -- namely baking soda and baking powder -- and why certain recipes call for one or the other (or sometimes both).
In her excellent book Bakewise, Shirley Corriher devotes a fair amount of space right away to chemical leaveners, identifying the Two Biggest questions that face home bakers regarding chemical leavening: "How much chemical leavener to use? and How to evenly distribute the leaveners throughout the batter or dough."
The key to answering these questions is understanding the nature of the leaveners that we're working with. If you're like we were before we researched this post, you know little about leaveners other than that they're not to be tinkered with when tweaking recipes. You may find it interesting -- as we did -- to learn that baking soda and baking powder are actually not so very different.
Baking Soda
Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate and is "moderately alkaline," according to Mrs. Corriher. It can have an unpleasant "soapy" taste if it isn't balanced out by an acid of some kind in your muffin or scone. However it is really powerful, with 4 times the leavening strength of baking powder when you combine it with ingredients whose acids can neutralize baking soda's flavor. Corriher lists chocolate, molasses, honey, citrus juice, buttermilk and brown sugar among the ingredients that play well with baking soda.
Baking Powder
Baking powder is generally less powerful than baking soda because it is actually made frombaking soda! In fact, there is an awful lot of conversation about the ease of making your own baking powder. In this handy Hotline thread about cookie leavening, Shuna Lydon jumps in with some great tips about baking powder:
"Making your own baking powder is really easy and a fantastic solution if you can't find non-alluminated in your area. Baking soda can be found in most 'creaming method' cookies (such as chocolate chip or snickerdoodles) because brown sugars are high in acid. It's important to know that baking powder makes recipes stale faster and, for many people, tastes bitter or metallic. I prefer less rise and use Rumford baking powder or make my own."
Want to make your own baking powder? Shuna's got a recipe for it on her blog:
Homemade Baking Powder
1/4 cup cream of tartar
2 tablespoons baking soda
1 tablespoon cornstarch (optional)
Sift ingredients. Twice if they began lumpy. Transfer to a clean, dry, tight sealing glass jar. Store at room temperature for up to 6 weeks.
Some General Tips
Shirley Corriher shares her Rules of Leavening in this interview on Culinate:
BAKING POWDER: 1 teaspoon per cup of flour
BAKING SODA: 1/4 teaspoon per cup of flour
If a recipe uses significantly more or less baking soda or baking powder than the measurements above, you should consider tinkering with the proportions, or at least know that the recipe may not turn out.
Self-rising flour is flour with baking powder and salt already added to it (1 1/4 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/4 teaspoon of salt per 1 cup of flour). It too can be easily made at home. The advantage of the pre-made stuff, though, is how evenly the leavener is distributed throughout the flour. This tends to produce a better final product, as sifting often does not adequately distribute leaveners.
Last but not least, as with any ingredient, it is important that your leaveners are no more than about 6 months old. If you want to test their strength, it's simple. Mix a little vinegar with some baking soda; if it fizzes up, it's good. Mix baking powder and water together and look for the same bubbly reaction.
Baking soda (left) and baking powder, passing the freshness test.
Do you make your own baking powder? What are your leavening tips?
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