What Do Baking Soda and Baking Powder Do? | Kenji's Cooking Show

I've posted before about the importance of pH on food preparation, but the increase in browning is one of the easiest ones for home cooks to exploit.

Want something to brown better without having to increase the heat? Increase its pH.

With that being said, I personally can't stand big, fluffy pancakes. Give me thin pancakes any day of the week.

If you're interested in food chemistry, check out On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, How to Read a French Fry by Russ Parsons, or The Food Lab by J Kenji Lopez-Alt. I own them all and have read through and cooked out of some of each of them.

Dihydrogen Monoxide!

Source - Reddit

OMG, that solution is so basic.

No, not basic, basic.

Why dutched cocoa is different from natural cocoa

"It's Dutching time!"

Thanks, Adam.

Turns out there's some serious chemistry happening in the kitchen when you're making - and especially when you're dutching - some chocolate from scratch.

pH Tweet

 

See, it's funny because a pH 10 solution would be basic.

The joke subverts your expectations. You see the, "[y]ou're a 10..." and think it's going to be a compliment, that the 10 is on a scale of 0-10.

But, no...they've put the 10 on a logarithmic pH scale where 10 means that the solution contains 1 x 10^-10 moles of H+ ions per liter of solution.

Hah, take that!

You've been served!

Why Baking Soda is the Most Useful Ingredient in Your Kitchen | What's Eating Dan?

pH is frickin' cool.

Today's video has Dan explaining how baking soda helps with browning (facilitating the maillard reactions), tenderizing ground meat while letting it stay moist, and can help speed up the cooking of kidney beans, onions, polenta, green beans, and broccoli.

Watch the video and become a better cook.

Don't Play With ACID SLIME

Why would you ever think that making acid slime was a smart thing?

Making a video and project based on a moronic YouTube comment seems like a really bad idea, not necessarily anything especially dangerous, just something dumb.

The acid clearly doesn't let the slime 'set up' which isn't really all that surprising because polyvinyl alcohol slime holds together via cross linking (check the graphics here), and the extra hydrogen ions would likely break down all of those cross links - if not even depolymerize the PVA.

The pH test strips, by the way, are absolutely useless there because all of the acids that they're testing would have pHs well below 1, leaving them likely outside the useful range of the strips.

That was dumb.

Red Cabbage Chemistry - Sick Science! #105

...but the smell...

If you don't want to buy universal indicator, make yourself some red cabbage solution. It's cheaper. It's available at your local grocery store.

And it smells like cabbage.

You can - if you're a school - also buy cabbage extract powder from some science suppliers.

It's a great way to pass an afternoon...or just to entertain yourself while your significant other makes red cabbage to go along with the smoked sausages if you - like I - don't eat cabbage.

Results after the jump...in case you're too lazy to do the experiment yourself...

All About That Base (No Acid)

When a song this catchy comes along, it's no surprise that AcapellaScience 2 picked this as a good song to parody.

Oh, my God, Becky, look at her pH...

Acidball

See, it's funny because they're playing BASEball.

Get it...bases...with OH- ions?

Admittedly, that would be one tough baseball to keep a grip on.