Baking soda in boiling water
January 4, 2020 1:26 PM Subscribe
My grandmother’s recipe for banana bread calls for mixing 2 tsp of baking soda in a half cup of boiling water, then pouring this mixture into the batter. I’m wondering (a) if I can add these ingredients separately or (b) what purpose this particular step serves.
The soda/water mixture goes into the batter after shortening, sugar, and eggs, but before flour, salt, and banana. I dutifully follow the instructions every time (and when I was a girl, this step was often the one she had me do when I helped her make the banana bread at the holidays), but every time worry that it will cook the eggs (it never seems to). For the record, the soda bubbles fiercely when you add it to the water, as you would expect, but the bread doesn’t seem to suffer from this early activation of the leavener. It is a denser, moister banana bread than many quick breads, but that’s what makes it so delicious.
The soda/water mixture goes into the batter after shortening, sugar, and eggs, but before flour, salt, and banana. I dutifully follow the instructions every time (and when I was a girl, this step was often the one she had me do when I helped her make the banana bread at the holidays), but every time worry that it will cook the eggs (it never seems to). For the record, the soda bubbles fiercely when you add it to the water, as you would expect, but the bread doesn’t seem to suffer from this early activation of the leavener. It is a denser, moister banana bread than many quick breads, but that’s what makes it so delicious.
Best answer: The baking soda starts to react earlier because you put it in the boiling water. This is a way of ensuring that it reacts fully and a way of ensuring that the baking soda is evenly distributed through the mixture with no tiny bitter lumps. If your bread batter is dense it could be a problem to get a full reaction or if the baking soda is clumping it might not dissolve properly. Dissolving it in the boiling water avoids both problems.
This is probably a version of an older recipe from before baking powder mixtures were readily available. If you don't want to do this use baking powder and water or baking soda, cream of tarter and water. If you skip the boiling water stage the bread won't raise quite as much, but given the reliable quality of baking powder and baking soda nowadays it's likely to not matter very much if you just use baking soda and cold water unless your batter is so thick that it is hard to stir.
posted by Jane the Brown at 2:11 PM on January 4, 2020 [8 favorites]
This is probably a version of an older recipe from before baking powder mixtures were readily available. If you don't want to do this use baking powder and water or baking soda, cream of tarter and water. If you skip the boiling water stage the bread won't raise quite as much, but given the reliable quality of baking powder and baking soda nowadays it's likely to not matter very much if you just use baking soda and cold water unless your batter is so thick that it is hard to stir.
posted by Jane the Brown at 2:11 PM on January 4, 2020 [8 favorites]
Response by poster: It’s definitely baking soda and, as Jane the Brown notes, soda reacts in boiling water. (That’s one way to check the freshness of soda.)
Jane the Brown, it would not surprise me to learn this recipe was developed before baking powder formulations were widely available - to my knowledge, my grandmother had been making this long before I was born (and I’m 42 now). The batter is quite dense, as well, and this method as a way to ensure even distribution of the soda also makes sense. I’ll have to experiment with using baking powder and/or soda and cold water.
posted by devinemissk at 2:19 PM on January 4, 2020 [4 favorites]
Jane the Brown, it would not surprise me to learn this recipe was developed before baking powder formulations were widely available - to my knowledge, my grandmother had been making this long before I was born (and I’m 42 now). The batter is quite dense, as well, and this method as a way to ensure even distribution of the soda also makes sense. I’ll have to experiment with using baking powder and/or soda and cold water.
posted by devinemissk at 2:19 PM on January 4, 2020 [4 favorites]
Jane the Brown, it would not surprise me to learn this recipe was developed before baking powder formulations were widely available -
Doubtful. Baking powder was in fairly wide use by the 1850s, and bananas were essentially unknown in the US much before the 1880s.
posted by Miko at 4:58 PM on January 4, 2020 [3 favorites]
Doubtful. Baking powder was in fairly wide use by the 1850s, and bananas were essentially unknown in the US much before the 1880s.
posted by Miko at 4:58 PM on January 4, 2020 [3 favorites]
I agree with ambrosen that you would not expect baking soda to react chemically with the boiling water. If adding baking soda to boiling water results in bubbles, then I don't think it's CO₂ that's being given off. Rather, I think that the particles of baking soda are acting as nuclei for the hot water, which then turns to steam, and the steam is what forms the bubbles. So you are not activating the baking soda by dissolving it in the water.
posted by alex1965 at 7:43 PM on January 4, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by alex1965 at 7:43 PM on January 4, 2020 [3 favorites]
Disregard my answer above. According to the Wikipedia page, baking soda does form some carbon dioxide (CO2) when it's heated (see below for an excerpt). I think this quote refers to dry baking soda, but I suppose the same process occurs in water. I dunno. Someone who's a chemist should chime in here.
Above 50 °C (122 °F), sodium bicarbonate gradually decomposes into sodium carbonate, water, and carbon dioxide. The conversion is faster at 200 °C (392 °F):[67]posted by alex1965 at 8:07 PM on January 4, 2020
2 NaHCO3 → Na2CO3 + H2O + CO2
I think the bananas in the recipe are the most modern element. Possibly your grandmother modified a recipe for Indian pudding. Indian pudding was common in the 1700's and early 1800's and has a very dense batter made largely of cornmeal and pumpkin. It might or might not contain wheat flour, depending on the family budget.
If I had bought a few bananas at the Philidelphia World's Fair in 1876 back when they were sold wrapped in silver paper and cost ten whole cents each, and then discovered they were going brown, baking them up in a pudding would have been an obvious way to try to salvage my investment. Indian pudding, with the large quantity of fruit mush already in it seems like a logical recipe to attempt to adapt to the banana. Indian pudding is also a recipe that needs a bit of extra care to ensure it raises at all.
The oldest recipe for Indian Pudding produces a mush that was boiled in a leather bag and of course predates the colonial era. A few decades later the pudding might have been leavened with a bit of pearlash (powdered lye) combined with an acid such as sour milk to create the chemical reaction that puts bubbles of gas in the batter so it was no longer quite so mushy. It might have been boiled in a cloth bag, but it also might have been baked in a cast iron dutch oven. Another few decades, bringing us to around 1840, and salteratus came on the market for the well off housewife who didn't want to make her own lye and collect the crystals, and didn't want to spend twenty minutes vigorously beating egg whites either. Salteratus is potassium bicarbonate. If you think that the world is changing fast and there are new products and innovations all the time, you'll not be surprised that it was only a couple of decades after that, before salteratus was considered passe and the discerning housewife switched to baking soda as the most desirable new product to hit the shelves.
Baking powder arrived in 1856, but that didn't mean every housewife used it. Some of them were still just making the mush version, as it was the cheapest, and most housewives couldn't afford fancy tins of powdered leavening. Since your recipe uses plain baking soda, I am guessing that there was a recipe in someone's receipt book that was more than thirty years old which was the inspiration for the banana bread your family now cherishes. It all depends on when your ancestor first had to urgently find a use for over ripe bananas.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:12 PM on January 4, 2020 [7 favorites]
If I had bought a few bananas at the Philidelphia World's Fair in 1876 back when they were sold wrapped in silver paper and cost ten whole cents each, and then discovered they were going brown, baking them up in a pudding would have been an obvious way to try to salvage my investment. Indian pudding, with the large quantity of fruit mush already in it seems like a logical recipe to attempt to adapt to the banana. Indian pudding is also a recipe that needs a bit of extra care to ensure it raises at all.
The oldest recipe for Indian Pudding produces a mush that was boiled in a leather bag and of course predates the colonial era. A few decades later the pudding might have been leavened with a bit of pearlash (powdered lye) combined with an acid such as sour milk to create the chemical reaction that puts bubbles of gas in the batter so it was no longer quite so mushy. It might have been boiled in a cloth bag, but it also might have been baked in a cast iron dutch oven. Another few decades, bringing us to around 1840, and salteratus came on the market for the well off housewife who didn't want to make her own lye and collect the crystals, and didn't want to spend twenty minutes vigorously beating egg whites either. Salteratus is potassium bicarbonate. If you think that the world is changing fast and there are new products and innovations all the time, you'll not be surprised that it was only a couple of decades after that, before salteratus was considered passe and the discerning housewife switched to baking soda as the most desirable new product to hit the shelves.
Baking powder arrived in 1856, but that didn't mean every housewife used it. Some of them were still just making the mush version, as it was the cheapest, and most housewives couldn't afford fancy tins of powdered leavening. Since your recipe uses plain baking soda, I am guessing that there was a recipe in someone's receipt book that was more than thirty years old which was the inspiration for the banana bread your family now cherishes. It all depends on when your ancestor first had to urgently find a use for over ripe bananas.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:12 PM on January 4, 2020 [7 favorites]
Well, it makes for good storytelling to imagine a lone ingenious cook making substitutions in her kitchen, and that (or a happy accident) is a trope we often find in food memory and nostalgia - but it's doubtful. Banana cake/bread recipes were already showing in cookbooks by the late 19th century, as verified by the Food Timeline. Indian pudding was highly regional (and much wetter than banana bread, as well as having a different ingredient profile), but tea breads and cakes like banana bread have been commonly found since the mid-19th century. Far more likely she was just following a published recipe.
Mrs. Beecher's 1885 cookbook describes banana bread as made in the West Indies, with ash. Until the 1940s or so, based on a few minutes' research today, the term "banana bread" seems to have referred exclusively to an actual attempt to make white bread with dried banana-meal flour, which seems to have been explored for some time when bananas were a new import, as a potentially non-perishable commodity. But it was used to make a white sandwich bread, not a cake. What we call "banana bread" is culinarily a cake, or "quick bread" or "tea bread." Banana "bread," as we know it, appears not to have been known by that name very frequently until about the 1930s, when a wave of recipes for the quick, loaf-shaped, sweet tea bread made with mashed bananas are circulated.
Lynne Olver credits the marketing of branded soda and powder with the proliferation of quick breads:
So at the time the grandmother of someone who's 40 today was actively cooking, banana bread already existed as a widely known and printed recipe subject (often on the back of a baking soda box or powder tin), baking powder had existed for almost a century, and the method was far more than likely to learned from a recipe than invented on the spot.
(I'm a food historian).
posted by Miko at 7:19 AM on January 5, 2020 [14 favorites]
Mrs. Beecher's 1885 cookbook describes banana bread as made in the West Indies, with ash. Until the 1940s or so, based on a few minutes' research today, the term "banana bread" seems to have referred exclusively to an actual attempt to make white bread with dried banana-meal flour, which seems to have been explored for some time when bananas were a new import, as a potentially non-perishable commodity. But it was used to make a white sandwich bread, not a cake. What we call "banana bread" is culinarily a cake, or "quick bread" or "tea bread." Banana "bread," as we know it, appears not to have been known by that name very frequently until about the 1930s, when a wave of recipes for the quick, loaf-shaped, sweet tea bread made with mashed bananas are circulated.
Lynne Olver credits the marketing of branded soda and powder with the proliferation of quick breads:
"Banana nut bread eventually became a mainstream staple item [ie included in many popular American cookbooks] by the 1920s. This coincided somewhat with the mass marketing of baking powder/soda, ingredients used to create "quick breads" [breads that did not require yeast]. Food companies deluged American consumers recipes to promote the use of their flour and baking soda products. Eventually these companies manufactured boxed mixes [Baking mixes were introduced in the late 1940s] for banana nut bread/muffins."Olver also mentions that banana bread was promoted by health gurus, especially on TV in the 50s - and TV brings to mind the aggressive banana marketing of that era, a result of fruit trade wars and an aim for American corporate dominance of the banana trade. Magazines of that time period are full of banana ads including recipes.
So at the time the grandmother of someone who's 40 today was actively cooking, banana bread already existed as a widely known and printed recipe subject (often on the back of a baking soda box or powder tin), baking powder had existed for almost a century, and the method was far more than likely to learned from a recipe than invented on the spot.
(I'm a food historian).
posted by Miko at 7:19 AM on January 5, 2020 [14 favorites]
The link to Mrs. Beecher on West Indian banana bread got mixed up - here's the accurate link.
posted by Miko at 7:27 AM on January 5, 2020
posted by Miko at 7:27 AM on January 5, 2020
Best answer: Chemist here. Baking soda decomposes with heat and/or with acid. I would suggest trying the same recipe but with cold water (My mum's banana cake recipe has me dissolve the soda in milk, which is slightly basic and probably retards the reaction a little until it gets in the oven).
You'll probably find that you get a slightly fluffier finished product because more of the bicarbonate will decompose in the oven. Which means you can reduce the amount of soda you use, which will almost certain be a good thing, because baking soda has a nasty taste.
posted by kjs4 at 3:39 PM on January 5, 2020 [3 favorites]
You'll probably find that you get a slightly fluffier finished product because more of the bicarbonate will decompose in the oven. Which means you can reduce the amount of soda you use, which will almost certain be a good thing, because baking soda has a nasty taste.
posted by kjs4 at 3:39 PM on January 5, 2020 [3 favorites]
I'd guess it's saving you from having to sift the leavening into the other dry ingredients, which can be messy and slow, especially if you're making a big batch.
posted by wnissen at 10:53 AM on January 6, 2020
posted by wnissen at 10:53 AM on January 6, 2020
« Older World history books for a sheltered young teen? | Please make this “smart” thermostat dumb as a rock... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
The reason you put baking soda into boiling water before adding it is in order to dissolve it fully: it's unpleasantly salty and mouth-drying if you come across it poorly mixed in the finished cake, and doing this allows the batter to be thicker without having to worry too much about having any dry baking soda (aka bicarbonate of soda (NaHCO₃)) come up in the finished product. The acidity of the bananas will release the CO₂ from the baking soda and make the bubbles in the cake on cooking.
I think if you do use baking soda, you'll get a much softer textured banana bread.
posted by ambrosen at 2:02 PM on January 4, 2020 [5 favorites]