include a significant acidic ingredient. That’s why you see
so many classic recipes for buttermilk pancakes and
buttermilk biscuits or cake recipes that contain vinegar. The
buttermilk is not just a flavoring agent—it provides the
necessary acid to react with the baking soda and leaven the
bread. Around the middle of the nineteenth century,
someone realized that rather than relying on the home cook
to add an acidic ingredient to react with the baking soda, it’d
be much simpler to add a powdered acid directly to the
baking soda itself, and baking powder was born. Composed
of baking soda, a powdered acid, and a starch (to absorb
moisture and prevent the acid or base from reacting
prematurely), baking powder was marketed as the all-in-one
solution for busy housewives. In its dry state, it’s totally
inert. But once you add a liquid, the powdered acid and
base dissolve and react with each other, creating bubbles of
carbon dioxide, without the need for an external acid
source.
Neat, right? But hold on—there’s more.
Side Effects
The most interesting side effect of using baking soda in a
recipe is that it affects browning in a major way. The
Maillard reaction, named after Louise Camille Maillard,
who first described its processes in the early twentieth
century, is the set of reactions responsible for that beautiful
brown crust on your steak and the deep color of a good loaf
of bread. Aside from cosmetics, the reaction also produces
hundreds of aromatic compounds that add an inimitable
savoriness and complexity to foods.