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Should you add baking soda to pancakes or hash browns? Here it is, an urgent question, which to this day causes a lot of controversy among hostesses. Right now, in the comments on one pancake recipe, I read how avid cook lovers proved their case on this score - some, literally foaming at the mouth, cited a lot of arguments in favor of soda, while others, listing the minuses, advised not to use this additive in similar recipes.
To be or not to be, to add or not to add - who is right in the current dispute, let's try to figure it out in this article.
I must say right away that I have been baking pancakes in milk for a long time, moreover, I don’t add soda to them - and without this they turn out thin and tasty . But, if we talk about pancakes on kefir or yogurt, baking soda will be more than appropriate in them - lactic acid reacts with soda, resulting in the formation of carbon dioxide. It just provides us with an airy and “bubble” dough structure, from which soft and fluffy pancakes are obtained.
On this, one could finish, but still I want to say a few words about how professional chefs treat soda . Specialists, as it turned out, have no complaints about her, that is, soda can be added to any recipe, like baking powder . For example, soda will make thin pancakes more “openwork”, but lush pancakes with its help will become even “higher” and will not “fall” at the end of frying.
In order for the dough to acquire a “bubble” structure , it is necessary to extinguish the soda either with vinegar or using citric acid for this - by the way, it also neutralizes the specific soda smell characteristic of many bakery products.
So, there is no point in arguing about this - everyone turned out to be right in their own way. Soda is the component that can be added to recipes at the request of the culinary specialist, and he must decide for himself in this matter - to be or not to be.
In any case, experiment, because the same recipe, with and without the addition of soda, can “play out” in completely different ways.