Baking Soda vs Baking Powder

I’ve often told people, if anyone can find a way to screw up cooking in a dutch oven, it’ll be me. Admittedly, that was me early on.

My problem is I am an adventurous cook, meaning if it’s laying around I’ll try it as part of the recipe. Alas, there have been plenty of wonderful recipes lost in oblivion, because I failed to document my hasty experiments… My family still talks about that wonderful steak I once made! On the other side, of the same token, there are also those hasty experiments I’m glad were lost into oblivion.

One of the things I really had a hard time getting was understanding how exactly baking powder and baking soda affected the flavor and quality of cooking. To put it in quick terms… baking soda hastens the browning process of breads. Add too much and the outside of the bread (crust) will dang near darken to a burn before the inside is cooked. The key, of course, is to not use too much baking soda.

Here is a wonderful article that will easily explain the differences between not only baking soda and baking powder, but also how different amounts of baking soda can affect the browning process of breads, pancakes, etc

Once I understood what this article explains, my burned quick breads were a thing of the past

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Baking powder and baking soda. Both of them are used so frequently in quick baking projects that unless you are a recipe developer, rarely do you consider what each of them actually does for your finished product. How come my scones call for baking powder, but my buttermilk biscuits call for a mixture of powder and soda? Is there an easy way to substitute one for the other if I don’t have both on hand? And why do I have to bake my muffins right after mixing the batter?

This edition of the Food Lab is a quick and dirty guide to how they work, and how they affect the outcome of your recipe. For those of you who want an even quicker and dirtier guide, jump straight to the summary at the bottom of the page.Back to Bases

Before we jump straight into the mix, let’s take a quick look at the structure of leavened breads. I promise the science won’t be too unbearable.

When you get down to it, leavened bread is simply a ball of protein filled with gas*. When flour is mixed with a liquid, two proteins naturally present in wheat called glutenin and gliadin link together to form a stretchy, resilient matrix known as gluten. Without a leavening agent—something to fill that gluten with air—baked goods would be nearly inedible.

With traditional or “slow” breads, that leavening agent is a living fungus called yeast. As the yeast consumes sugars present in the flour, it releases carbon dioxide gas, forming thousands of teeny tiny air pockets inside the dough and causing it to rise. Once you pop that dough in the oven, those air pockets heat up and further expand, and a phenomenon known as oven spring takes place. Finally, as the gluten gets hot enough, it sets into a semisolid form, giving structure to the bread, and turning it from wet and stretchy to dry and spongy.

The only problem with yeast? It takes a long, long time to work. Enter baking soda. Unrestricted by the protracted timeframes of biological organisms, it relies instead on the quick chemical reaction between an acid and a base.

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For the rest of the article, visit

http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/06/what-is-the-difference-between-baking-powder-and-baking-soda-in-pancakes.html