A Secret for successful baking
Successful baking is another way of keeping a family happy. For who isn’t filled with the joy of living when tempted by the penetrating aroma of Gingerbread, rich and spicy ... or a piece of luscious velvety Chocolate Cake, full of flavor? What adds more zest to a meal than a surprise plate of hot breads ... fragrant Cinnamon Buns, maybe Lemon Clover Rolls, delicate Soda Biscuits or Old Fashioned Corn Bread?
The secret for making these successfully is as “old as the hills” but as new as the morrow. Baking soda! Yes, grandmother used it in her prized recipes and the modern homemaker finds it making her baking day a success.
Arm & Hammer Brand and Cow Brand Baking Soda are refined bicarbonate of soda whose standard of purity is that set up by the United States Pharmacopoeia. For over 90 years this mild, healthful, alkaline substance has been creating baking history. All these years homemakers have depended on baking soda to make their baked products deliciously moist and delicately light and tender.
“How,” asks the inexperienced homemaker, “does baking soda make cakes, cookies and quick breads light and tender every time?”
Baking soda has stored in it a tremendous quantity of carbon dioxide gas, the same gas found in soda water and ginger ale. This is released when it comes in contact with any acid material such as the many mild acids naturally found in cooking ingredients.
Among those ingredients are chocolate, cocoa, brown sugar, tomato juice, sour milk, buttermilk, apple sauce, spices, cottage cheese, molasses, vinegar, citrus fruit juices and many more. These acid ingredients are familiar to everyone. One or more of them, you will notice, is used almost every time you bake.
The baking soda gently but surely reacts with these natural acids, freeing millions of tiny carbon dioxide bubbles which are held enmeshed in the batters and doughs. As this gas expands during the baking, the product becomes light and tender. Thus it is that baking soda uses nature’s own unrivaled acids to leaven and lighten baked products.