My neighbour has asked me to buy some organic bicarbonate of soda? Does such a concept exist? I thought bicarbonate of soda was produced by a chemical process.
If I were a food manufacturer I would remove some completely harmless ingredient, market the product as 'lovingly made without xxx' and double the price, or is that what they do anyway :-)
It doesn't state it on the label, but I strongly suspect it is free from bicycles and trimarans as well.
It can also be mined, same as salt when its called nahcolite - but the same chemical formula (NaHCO3). "It is commercially mined using common underground mining techniques such as bore, drum, and longwall mining in a fashion very similar to coal mining. "
Its been claimed that some products trumpeted as "low fat" often have extra sugar added to maintain their appeal, while products trumpeted as "low sugar" often have extra fat.
michael adams
...
I see it has been thought of ...
Five women were sitting around a table eating sprouted whole grain scones, talking about the latest in health scandals. Martha turned to Jody and with a sly smile whispered into Jody?s perfect curly-q ear, ?Did you know baking powder has aluminum in it? I bet Janice used baking powder in her scones! We?re all going to get Alzheimer?s now. Thanks a lot, Janice.?
Jody squinted her eyes and gave it a bit of thought, and turned to the manicured Steffi and whispered, ?Did you hear? Baking powder has aluminum in it!?
Steffi, not quite sure what to make of this information, leaned over and whispered to Maggie, ?What?s the deal with baking soda containing aluminum? I thought that was BAD!? And Maggie, ever the first to know of shameful health trends, stands up, flips over the table and says, ?YOUR BAKING SODA HAS ALUMINUM IN IT, JANICE! WE WILL NOT BE LUNCHING HERE TODAY.?
Then all the ladies, except for poor, confused Janice, march out the door and into their nearest Whole Foods to find aluminum-free baking soda.
And that, my friends, is how the myth about baking soda containing aluminum became a widely held misconception.
Much like my time spent researching borax and olive oil, it really wasn?t all that easy to get to the bottom of this baking soda anti-hoax. Everywhere you turn, there are people proudly claiming they only buy Bob?s Red Mill Aluminum-Free Baking Soda, because, by gosh and all, if it doesn?t say aluminum-free, then it must contain aluminum.
Source:
They might mean 'food grade' - pure enough for eating rather than intended for cleaning things and so might have non-edible impurities.
Theo
Pretty much like everything else, then.
But the source you quote conflates baking powder and baking soda. And, as your source admits, at least in the past baking powder did sometimes contain aluminium salts. And even the best of us will occasionally mix up the two. So it seems perfectly reasonable to specify aluminium free for baking powder *and* baking soda, although it is really only applicable to the first one.
AIUI baking powder also contains an acidic component; citric acid is used, and I imagine aluminium sulphate in the past and even possibly these days. I believe it helps the bicarb component to break down and liberate it's CO2* during cooking, helping the sponge or whatever to rise. But baking soda, AKA bicarb or bicarbonate of soda, is simply that, with nothing added.
*Do all these greenie cooks, housewives etc realise that they're liberating one of the atmosphere's worst contaminants by BAKING? OMG! :-)
Is an aluminium salt 'aluminium'? Does a fish pie contain sodium, chlorine, hydrogen and oxygen? I think not.
It brings a whole new meaning to Mr Trump's 'chlorinated chicken' if any dish containing table salt is deemed to contain chlorine.
"Bicarbonate of Soda can be used instead of baking powder..."
No it can't. Baking powder contains one or more acid in solid form to liberate the CO2, and usually some sort of flour to help with mixing.
I assume that recipes requiring baking *soda* include some sort of acid such as lemon juice.
That's relevant for baking *powder* as it would contain maize starch (cornflour) instead of wheat flower. I suppose it's a reasonable warning to people who don't know the difference between baking powder and baking soda.
So in fact, the fashion industry isn't "One of the worst greenhouse gas emitters", as they were telling us on the radio yesterday, it's the bakers. Especially the organic ones.
What about human or animal products or nuts? Brian
Mostly Americans then. Brian
Rather depends on your definition of these things. Is an ionised element the same as the element itself? Strictly speaking, no, but the average MITS probably doesn't appreciate the difference.
/rant I don't understand why there is such antipathy towards chlorine-washed chicken from the US. I remember some years ago watching a cookery programme starring Heston Blumenthal, where he was slow-cooking whole chicken at a temperature too low to kill the bacteria. He said the bacteria were all on the outside, on the skin, and proceeded to sterilise it by flaming it with a blow-torch before cooking it (he did have a rather flamboyant style to his cooking!). Washing with chlorine water presumably achieves the same result.
I should think 98% of us drink chlorinated water without giving it a second thought, so why not chlorine-washed chicken? If the great British public doesn't like it, if it tastes of chlorine for example, they won't buy it. /rant
Almost everything you need to know about a white powder is given in this article by a journo:-)
while they are different things, some recipes can use soda in lieu of powder. I guess there is enough acidity for an adequate reaction anyway.
NT
It's more that the US uses the rinse with chlorinated water as a substitute for better animal welfare standards, supposedly. And that more people get food poisoning there. Dunno if either is true - I didn't suffer anything similar in 12 years living there. But there again, perhaps I was just lucky.
But "washed in chlorine" sounds a lot more nasty than "poor animal welfare standards", so bullshitters will tend to use that expression.
Me neither given that its such a common treatment for water supplys in the first world and for swimming pools and salad veg in europe. Its just more bullshit.
And is much easier in a big meat processing operation.
After ifs been thru dozens of kidneys too in London.
Indeed.
Yeah, I've never tasted it and the chicken I eat comes form by far the biggest chicken operation in the southern hemisphere and I know they do wash it in chlorine water.
It is not the chlorination itself that is the problem. That is perfectly safe.
There are a couple of problems with it though:
1) it helps hide some of the contamination effects of poor conditions and care for the animals, by killing off contamination that would not be there otherwise and allows farmers, transport companies, abattoirs and food preparation companies to get away with poor practice. 2) it does not kill everything off and can cause bacteria to (temporarily) stop multiplying, so food tests as safe at the packing stage, but multiplication restarts later and becomes dangerous.Figures that I saw a few months ago showed US rates of food poisoning as around 8 times higher than in the UK.
SteveW
Not hide so much as handle that fine.
Same with water supplies. Some jurisdictions do have stringent conditions on dams, not allowing the use of them by boats and fishing etc to keep the water as clean as possible, but even those still need to chlorinate the water to get rid of the worst of the stuff that remains anyway.
Same with swimming pools, its impossible to stop little kids pissing in them and people not showing before using the pool.
Sure, but its just not feasible to do massive treat chicken meat operations so that there is never any surface contamination in the process of producing the raw meat for retail. The only thing that makes any sense is to as good a job as feasible, chlorine water wash the meat as final insurance given that its obviously harmless to humans given everyone treats water supplies with it.
Same with salad veg in europe.
But its less clear how much of that is their much higher consumption of chicken fast food and how those operations operate.
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