Too much baking soda will result in a soapy taste with a coarse, open crumb.
Use a small amount of an acidic condiment such as lemon juice or vinegar to neutralise the soda. If the recipe has chocolate, simply add half a teaspoon of cocoa powder to it. Buttermilk can also be used to counter the pungent taste of baking soda.
What happens if too much baking soda?
In too large a dose, baking soda is also poisonous. This is due to the powder’s high sodium content. When someone takes too much sodium bicarbonate, the body tries to correct the balance of salt by drawing water into the digestive system. This causes diarrhea and vomiting.
Have you ever baked cookies that were too hard, too soft or didn’t taste the way they should? The ingredients you used could be the culprit – using different sugars, melted butter, baking powder or baking soda can alter a cookie’s texture and taste.
When you use butter, including vegan butter, you want it to be softened but not melted. When softened butter is mixed with sugar, it creates air bubbles. Those air bubbles are then filled with carbon dioxide from the baking soda and as a result, you get crispy cookies.
Baking powder simply adds carbon dioxide to the equation, providing a more forceful pressure that encourages a dough to spread up and out. Without the well-developed elasticity of a bread dough, the strands of gluten in cookies would sooner snap than stretch, cracking along the surface.
When baking soda is mixed with an acid, the baking soda produces bubbles and a carbon dioxide gas, which cause the raw dough or batter to rise as a result. When baking soda is used in cookies, it gives the cookies a chewy, coarse texture.
Unless you want cakey cookies, avoid using baking powder: The cookies made with both the single- and double-acting baking powders were just too darn cakey. 2. Baking soda helps cookies spread more than baking powder.
Using lower-moisture sugar (granulated) and fat (vegetable shortening), plus a longer, slower bake than normal, produces light, crunchy cookies. That said, using a combination of butter and vegetable shortening (as in the original recipe), or even using all butter, will make an acceptably crunchy chocolate chip cookie.
Secrets to Thick, Soft, & Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Underbaked cookies are the secret to softness.
- Using cornstarch in the dough is another secret to softness, as well as the secret to thickness.
- Using more brown sugar than white sugar results in a moister, softer cookie.
- Adding an extra egg yolk increases chewiness.
What’s in a Chewy Cookie? Well, the long and short answer to chewy cookies is it’s all about the moisture content. Cookies that are dense and chewy incorporate more moisture into the batter. This can be achieved by making substitutions with ingredients, or even just changing the way you incorporate certain ingredients.
Chewy cookies are the opposite, as they tend to be somewhat malleable and bendable before they split into two pieces. Cakey cookies are on another end of the spectrum, as they are thicker than chewy cookies, but they are also a bit more rigid in structure than chewy cookies are.