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Baking

Prepared Flour

A sifted mixture of flour, cream of tartar, and carbonate of soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Flour and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,481 recipes. Both carry acetaldehyde, which smells pungent, ethereal. The science ↓

Prepared Flour

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Sift the flour, cream of tartar, and carbonate of soda together through a sieve three times. Ensure accurate measurements to avoid loss in quality.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the structure of the baked goods that the prepared flour will be used in.
Cream of tartar
Acts as an acid that reacts with carbonate of soda to help baked goods rise.
Carbonate of soda
Provides the alkali that reacts with cream of tartar to produce gas for rising.

The step that matters

Sifting three times. Thorough sifting spreads the carbonate of soda and cream of tartar evenly through the flour, so every batch rises consistently instead of in uneven pockets.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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