hey alton brown here in the cabinet uh that is our cabinet cam cabinet and uh on good eats it's empty pretty much right now because we're not in production although we still do have some cans of uh roadside delight uh flavored dog food long story from where that came from here's the one that's the extra crispy dog food we've got one that says now with our cats anyway um i understand that there are still some folks out there that aren't totally clear on the difference between baking soda and baking powder easy to get them mixed
up in recipes because they do look exactly alike but they do not function the same okay so here's the deal baking soda bicarbonate of soda as it's often called certainly in england um is a is a base okay that means it has a very low sorry very high alkaline and when it mixes with an acid like lemon juice or buttermilk the two get together and release a lot of gas okay you probably when you were a kid saw one of those baking soda rockets that at least we used when i was a kid in the
60s where you put in the baking soda pour in vinegar and then you close the thing up and it would launch from the expanding gases from that chemical reaction but it has to have an acid okay so you use this stuff you've got to have like the lemon juice or the buttermilk or what have you baking soda contains baking powder but it also contains an acid in the form of tartaric acid or cream of tartar which means this can make gas all by itself simply by getting wet and a lot of times other chemicals are
added so that it releases even more gas when it reaches a certain level of heat or a certain temperature in the oven those are called double acting uh baking powder so you don't need an additional acid for this okay this is what is in self-rising flour okay this is uh what we uh what we bake with very often though they are used in tandem uh you will end up using sometimes maybe a tablespoon of baking powder and then maybe just like a quarter or a half teaspoon of baking soda that's usually when a recipe has
other ingredients in it to balance or counteract flavor for instance [Music] okay in some chocolate chip cookies you would use both because they have brown sugar in them and brown sugar is acidic because of the molasses that's on the brown sugar so the baking soda would help to get an extra uh lift out of the out of that situation because this is balanced okay this is a balanced formula it doesn't need anything so you add a little bit more of this the ph the overall acidity or alkalinity of a batter or dough can be affected
by the addition of these especially this and that sometimes depending on the baked good can also change browning so not something you want to mess around with you can make your own if you know how if you don't have baking powder you can mix together certain proportions of baking soda and uh taric acid but they won't act exactly the same because they won't have the double acting capacity the other thing is that usually there's an anti-caking agent in here and a desiccant of some type to keep moisture from coming in and making that reaction release
itself early cream of tartar also has a lot of uses by itself it is used for instance when whipping egg whites because as an acid it can break down uh some of the protein bonds and help to beat eggs better so there you go tataric acid and baking soda are the base of baking powder but none of these things are exactly the same got it good i'll be back later i like this place you
