How To Bake Without Baking Powder: modern and historical alternatives for light and tasty baked goods

by Leigh Tate

Covers the science and history of baking powder, enabling you to create your own leavening power through basic kitchen chemistry. Includes how to make sour milk, buttermilk, and sourdough starter, plus the author's hardwood ash baking experiments. The recipes and science behind them will be of interest to homesteaders, preppers, do-it-yourselfers, homeschoolers, living historians, and historical reenactors. Contains a glossary, a list of resources, and 54 modern and historical recipes utilizing 20 different baking powder alternatives. Also available for Kindle and in paperback. Originally an eBook, this "prepper" edition supplies a hardcopy version of How To Bake Without Baking Powder for the homesteading preparedness library. The information will always be available even when electronic devices are not.

106 pages, Paperback

Published July 29, 2016

Reviews

[Anna]

Tate outdid herself with this ebook, which is chock full of both historical data and actionable information. If you're like me, you probably understand the basics of baking powder/baking soda --- you can use the latter if you include an acid, but need the former if you don't. But I've been left scratching my head many times when I saw a recipe that called for baking soda without anything I considered an acid to prompt the leavening reaction. Tate's book explained why, listing many culinary acids I hadn't considered and also explaining that baking soda actually causes some rising action by itself at high temperatures (such as in cookies).

Then she delves even deeper, looking at other ways you can get baked goods to rise without purchasing either baking powder or soda. Beaten eggs are a moderately mainstream method, but have you ever heard of the idea of soaking wood ashes and using that alkaline liquid along with an acid to puff your biscuits up? If the world comes to an end and baking soda is no longer available in the grocery store, you'll definitely want this book! And, in the meantime, the copious recipes at the end would be a really fun homesteading and/or homeschooling experiment to combine science with lunch. Actually, as I type this, just looking at the recipes is making me hungry....