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Dessert

Baking Powdee

A homemade leavening agent made from cream of tartar, corn starch, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Cream and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,532 recipes. Both carry 2-heptanol, which smells bitter, floral. The science ↓

Baking Powdee

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Powder the ingredients and sift them together several times to ensure they are well mixed.

  2. Mix the baking powder with the flour before adding other ingredients.

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. Cream + corntop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream of tartar
Acts as the acid that reacts with baking soda to release gas for rising.
Baking soda
Provides the alkaline base that reacts with the acid to produce carbon dioxide for rising.
Corn starch
Absorbs moisture and keeps the powder dry and free-flowing so it does not clump.

The step that matters

Sift the ingredients together thoroughly. If the acid and baking soda are not evenly distributed, pockets of each form, causing uneven rising and off flavours or bitter spots in baked goods.

“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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