http://www.care2.com/greenliving/homemade-baking-powder.html
Super Easy Homemade Baking Powder
By Melissa Breyer, Senior Producer, Care2 Green Living
I love to bake. I love throwing a mess of ingredients together and watching the charming chemistry that transforms that mess into something flakey and divine. But I don’t like baking powder. All too often it imparts a bitter-salty-chemically flavor that my animal instinct reacts poorly to. (As in, that tastes toxic, spit it out.) But alas, no baking powder, no leavening. So I have started using a very simple recipe for homemade baking powder that nixes the extra chemicals and doesn’t taste like a mouth full of metal. Hurray!
This is almost embarrassingly easy, and comes from the venerable Southern cook Edna Lewis. Some recipes call for corn starch as a filler, but I have never found the extra ingredient necessary.
INGREDIENTS
½ cup cream of tartar
4 tablespoons baking soda
Sift through a fine strainer three or four times and store in an airtight container.
Homemade baking powder can be stored for up to four weeks (make a half batch or smaller if you don’t use it much).
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8 comments
add your comment »What is and Where can you get Cream of Tartar:
http://www.ochef.com/933.htm
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What is and Where can you get Cream of Tartar:
http://www.ochef.com/933.htm
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I find, invariably, that if one can actually TASTE the baking powder or baking soda, it's not getting mixed in properly.
I know the aluminum isn't good for you and that's probably the main point.
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I grew up using baking soda in every recipe and cutting WAY back. I never use more than 1 rounded teaspoon even in the biggest recipes. The trick is having something in your recipe to react with the baking soda (like an acid.) If you are using buttermilk or something soured as a liquid, or a fruit (such as in banana bread or muffins) it will react with the soda and be your leavening. Otherwise add a little apple cider vinegar to the liquids in your recipe-- 1 or 2 tsp depending on size of your recipe-- and voila! the chemical reaction eliminates both the bitter of the soda and the acid of the vinegar and you have a beautiful rise! And then I always eliminate the salt in baked goods as the soda provides the sodium.
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I have been using cream of tartar plus baking soda as a substitute in gluten free baking because it seems to leaven my flour mixture (equal parts brown rice flour, tapioca flour and almond meal) better. But the cream of tartar is extremely expensive as Trixie noted above. Anyone know of an inexpenisive source? I remember reading it is a by product of wine-making?
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1/8 teaspoon Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) has 150 mg sodium. Therefore, 1 teaspoon has 1200 mg sodium. 1/8 teaspoon of baking powder has 60 mg sodium or 480 mg in 1 teaspoon.
Using less sodium is healthy for everyone.
Thus, baking powder is a better alternative to baking soda. My father refused to eat anything made with baking soda - he could taste the bitterness. Guess one cannot argue preferences or taste!
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cream of tartar in my area is very expensive. This isn't something I could do. I buy the baking powder that is aluminum free.
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Hi - I have always believed that baking powder was purely those ingredients anyway! The baking sode is the culprit for the bitter taste.
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