cooking | It’s always more complicated

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.

Great article, that includes a decent amount of science on how breads work.

My mom gave us this book over the holidays, and it’s incredible. We’re part of both the Poughkeepsie Farm Project and the Winter Sun CSA. This means that right now we’ve got lots of bags of root vegetables and squash. Beets, Potatoes, Rutabagas, Turnips, Sweet Potatoes, Acorn Squash, Butternut Squash, Hubbard Squash. Last winter we never quite got into the groove on the winter vegetables, so a lot of them went to waste.

But not this year. In the 5 days since we’ve had this book Susan’s made 2 recipes: a beet, turnip, squash, an onion roast mixed with goat cheese and pasta; sweet potato wedges. Both were great. As we flipped through this book nearly every page has something that you are just dying to try. My mom didn’t let the book out of her sight in Vermont until she managed to copy out a few recipes for herself.

So, if you are trying to figure out how to use vegetables in some new and tasty ways, especially ones you don’t normally cook, I can highly suggest this book.

It’s always more complicated

Tag Archives: cooking

Baking Power vs. Baking Soda

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