Baking soda

About the ingredient baking soda. Including 4,740 recipes with baking soda, nutrition data, where it's found, and video.

What is baking soda?

Baking soda is pure Sodium Bicarbonate, a naturally occurring white crystalline substance. When it comes to baking, sodium bicarbonate is the leavening agent that helps turn out light, airy breads and cakes of great heights.

This rising action happens when the baking soda is mixed with an acidic ingredient in your recipe. This could be something like lemon juice, buttermilk, sour cream, cocoa or molasses. When the soda comes in contact with this acid, it produces carbon dioxide gas bubbles which expand your batter and make your baked goods rise in the oven.

The chemical formula of baking soda is NaHC 3. Its home use lies mostly in baking, to leaven cakes containing acid ingredients such as buttermilk, vinegar, molasses, and fruit juices.

It is also used along with cream of tartar or baking powder where the amount of acid in the ingredients being combined varies a great deal, as it does when such things as chocolate, brown sugar, honey, sour cream, apples, etc., are mixed together.

A dough containing baking soda should be baked without delay since most of the leavening gas is produced at room temperature and will escape.

Formerly as saleratus, baking soda was used in baking and for cleaning butterchurns and other homely articles. It has been made in the US as early as 1839 and made a formidable competition for soda imported from England.

It is easy to see why: saleratus was packaged in a bright red wrapper, each pound coming with a free recipe card. This was a colorful era of marketing. You can now only imagine the delight of the children and all the onlookers as the soda salesman drove into town in a colorfully decorated wagon drawn by plumed horses. There was the jingle of bells and a trumpet blast.

One of the most memorable, and surely one of the most successful, salesmen was Colonel Powell, a former Barnum giant, who stood nine feet tall with the aid of a very high hat and a pair of extremely thick-soled shoes.

Aside from baking, the virtues of NaHCO3 are as many as they are varied. It will clean such diverse items as painted walls, plastic table mats, car windshields, crystal, costume jewelry, and even the family dog.

Take baking soda on a fishing trip? Certainly! It will brighten up those dull or rusted lures and hooks, rid your hands of fishy odors, take the soreness out of an accidental sunburn, and soothe the itch or sting of bug bites.