Category: Pastry

There have been precious few pictures this week and that’s due to one reason: the bananas I got on Wednesday were greener than green. I mean electric, neon green…that’s all the local Kroger had. So even though right now they’re undergoing accelerated ripening, stuffed in a paper bag choking on their own ethylene exhaust, they’re […]

I was planning to wind down the leavening chemistry thing at this point, but I’m getting so many questions about baking powder now that I’m thinking I need to press on. Since I’ve also received a few requests for banana bread the last several months, I think I’ll make that the project for the week. […]

Want to hear something really confusing? Both potassium bicarbonate and sodium bicarbonate were marketed under the name “saleratus” in the 1840’s. Why I have no idea, other than basic principles of branding and competitive differentiation were not well understood at the time. How else to explain why John Dwight, a baker from New York City, went to market selling his bicarbonate of soda as “Dwight’s Saleratus” in 1847?

I’m traveling today. There’s more on the evolution of baking soda coming…just not until Monday.

For those of you in ecological despair over my story of potash and the way greedy, ignorant Colonial folk treated the virgin land, I have some comfort to offer. Specifically, that while it is true there was some wholesale destruction of woodland in the interest of making potash (some of that forest, in truth, wasn’t […]

Of course this new-fangled chemical leavening wasn’t perfect. Sure it made bubbles in batters, yes it was harmless to ingest. Yet it had a decidedly odd taste compared to yeast. This was especially true if you simply used water to get the leavening reaction going. In that case your quickbread or biscuit would have an extremely bitter taste. Yet there were risks to using acids as well, for if you didn’t get the proportion of pearlash and sour milk just right the finished biscuit would taste even worse, at least if your batter had any fat in it. The reason, because alkaline + fat + heat = soap, which is what you’d get if you didn’t incite a thorough reaction and neutralize all the leavening. This sort of thing can and does still happen, notably in chocolate chip cookies if the baker decides to try to substitute baking soda for baking powder. Blechh.

It wasn’t long after potassium carbonate was finally isolated as the key ingredient in potash (Antonio Campanella, 1745) that enterprising chemists got interested in refining it, taking the extra step of heating potash to burn away its ashy residues. This had the effect of turning the powder a sparkling white, which thence became know as […]

Joe, when you say chemical leavening started with potash, do you mean the same potash I buy in bags at the hardware store to use in my garden? Yes that’s right, the very same stuff. Being such a strong alkaline, it is also extremely useful in neutralizing acid soils.

Why, America of course. What, you thought it was Irish? Perish the thought! It was Native Americans who first invented chemical leavening, using ashes as they did to “lighten” grain cakes. How did that work? you might ask. Well, ashes contain alkaline salts. Put them into a wet grain porridge and the result will be bubbles. Not a lot of bubbles mind you, but enough to make a difference in the cooked porridge cake’s texture. Of course the flavor is another matter, but that didn’t seem to bother the Indians much.