Made with a combination of sodium bicarbonate (aka baking soda) and cream of tartar, baking powder may make your life just a bit easier because it already has an acid in it. The Science / What We're Expecting: Not to be confused with the soda that we just broke down, baking powder is a beast of its own. *Note: While eggs are important in the leavening process of many baked goods, the incorporation of whole eggs has been kept constant across our trials and they are not being treated as primary leavening agents for the purposes of our recipe. We used the classic Nestlé Toll House cookie formula as our base recipe and simply swapped out the leavening agent, keeping the quantity the same.
#Baking powder vs baking soda professional
We stuck to five of the most popular varieties and combinations of leavening agents that professional bakers swear by and kept all of the other variables the same. To better understand how leavening agents affect cookies, we decided to test five batches of cookies and compare them in a side-by-side taste test. Usually you need a bit of both to jump-start the leavening but also to carry you through the whole baking process,” says McGorman. “Baking soda begins reacting in dough right away upon mixing, whereas double-acting baking powder gives you an additional hit - first when the ingredients are mixed together, and second as it hits the oven.
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“Good cookies will usually combine leavening types for a balanced final product,” says Anna McGorman, director of culinary operations for Milk Bar. So let's delve into what these products are made of and what the benefits or disadvantages are of them. Most home cooks and professional chefs stick to the tried-and-tested methods: baking soda, baking powder, or a combination of both. In cookie-land, you introduce leavening in a mechanical format when you cream butter and sugar together, but oftentimes the real leavening comes from a chemical agent. In layperson's terms, leavening your cookie involves introducing air to the cookies and can happen in a multitude of ways. So it's only fitting that we look at why our cookies rise in the first place.
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The rise on your cookie, something that is decided exclusively in the confines of your blazing oven and can't be judged at the dough stage, is a welcome addition to the experience of consuming a chocolate chip cookie. You also know the feeling of utter angst when your cookies simply refuse to rise or spread. If you've baked cookies before, you know the utter joy of watching your cookies spread far and wide as the edges brown and crackle with delight.