Baking powder is a leavening reaction in a can. It’s a combination of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) and at least one other acid, usually two, and then a little cornstarch to absorb any moisture and prevent the reaction from happening prematurely. As you might expect it’s the combination of acids that determine the way the baking powder performs, since different acids react with the soda in different ways depending on the conditions.
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Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) is the baking world’s go-to chemical bubbling agent. It’s a crystalline alkaline powder which, once it’s combined with water, dissolves into sodium ions and bicarbonate ions, the latter of which react with acid to create carbon dioxide gas.
That’s all very straightforward, no? However the interesting thing about baking soda is that you can get reactions of different speeds depending on what sorts of acids you pair it with. Common kitchen acids
READ ONYou don’t have to be a chemist to spot a certain pattern in the names of chemical leavening agents. Potassium carbonate. Potassium bicarbonate. Sodium carbonate. Sodium Bicarbonate. All are compounds that release CO2 when they’re either reacted with acids and/or degraded by heat. The logical question at this point is: are there any other carbonate salts out there that do the same job and that you can also safely eat?
READ ONAround the year 1775 industrial age chemists discovered that if you expose pearlash (potassium carbonate) to carbon dioxide gas the result was potassium bicarbonate, a compound that’s about twice as potent as regular old pearlash. The creation was dubbed “saleratus”, a Latin word meaning “aerated salt.” The discovery prompted an American entrepreneur by the name of Nathan Read to try making the stuff, which he did by suspending pearlash over vats of fermenting rum which produce — you guessed it — CO2. Very clever indeed. Read’s saleratus came on the market in 1788. But the stuff never really caught on as a leavener, mostly because it wasn’t terribly pure and hence not very reliable.
READ ONIf you or someone you know is into old (actually very old) recipes, odds are you’ve seen this listed as an ingredient here and there. Pearlash is refined potassium carbonate, an alkaline salt found in wood ashes that also goes by the name potash. Potash was used for a lot of things back in the 1700s and 1800s, especially glassmaking. These days we mostly know it as a fertilizer, but once upon a time it was used to leaven things like corn cakes since it makes bubbles when it gets wet. Given that potash was made from wood ash, its effect on the flavor of corn cakes was as you might expect, but hey, at least the texture was lighter.
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When chocolate liquor, the paste you get when you grind roasted cacao nibs, is placed in a hydraulic press and squeezed, two products result: cocoa butter and cocoa powder. However it’s important to note that the process doesn’t entirely separate the two. Some cocoa butter remains in the cocoa powder, which is designated as either low, medium or high fat, the fattiest being 24% cocoa butter and the leanest being 10% cocoa butter. The rest is all cocoa solids.
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Cocoa butter is a very unusual fat. Granted, in its refined form it doesn’t look like much. It’s white, flavorless, odorless and soap-like in its firmness. However it doesn’t take too much fiddling with it to understand how unique it is. First there’s the low melt point. Cocoa butter is comprised of 21 different fats, all of which melt between 55 and 114 degrees Fahrenheit. The average melting temperature of those fats is 87 degrees Fahrenheit. Which means that cocoa butter melts easily in the mouth — even on the skin, which is why cocoa butter is in such high demand in the cosmetic industry.
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Couverture (fine “covering” chocolate) is at once rare and pervasive. Home bakers seldom see chocolate that’s actually labeled “couverture” and so have trouble finding it when they want to glaze a torte or batch of truffles. On the other hand many of the more expensive chocolate bars in specialty shops are technically couvertures, which means the stuff is in reality not very hard to get.
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Chocolate purists like Mrs. Pastry will protest the presence of this substance in the chocolate section as it really isn’t a chocolate at all. The only reason it’s called “white chocolate” is because it contains cocoa butter — and you can tell if the white chocolate is reasonably high quality as it delivers that inimitable unctuous cocoa butter mouthfeel. White chocolate is among the sweetest of the chocolate confections at 55% sugar (though that’s a maximum by law in America). The rest is made up of cocoa butter (up to 30%), milk solids (15%) plus lecithin as an emulsifier. Lower quality white chocolates make use of cocoa butter equivalents (CBE’s) like palm oil, and as with low quality milk chocolates you can really taste the difference.
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This is not “couverture” chocolate (which means “coating” or “covering” in French), I’ll create a separate post on that subject. This is sort of couverture’s opposite, at least from a quality standpoint. Many people wouldn’t actually call this particular product “chocolate” since it has no cocoa butter in it. Rather it contains one or more so-called “cocoa butter equivalents” (CBE’s), fats like palm oil which perform similarly to cocoa butter but really aren’t the same. They don’t have cocoa butter’s silky and subtle mouthfeel, but on the other hand don’t have its rigidity (nor high price tag). CBE’s aside, these chocolates are almost identical to milk chocolate: high in sugar, low in chocolate liquor, and contain about 15% milk solids.
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