23 April 2016
Daniel Neman
You’re making cupcakes and the recipe calls for baking soda, but you reach for baking powder instead. Will that make a difference?
You want to make dulce de leche, but you bought evaporated milk instead of condensed. Is there still a way to make it?
You want to add a finishing touch of sherry to a pot of homemade beef soup, but all you have at home is cooking sherry. Should you use it? (Hint: No. No, you should not).
Today we look at ingredients that seem similar and how you can substitute one for the other, if possible.
What’s the difference between cooking sherry and regular sherry? This one is easy. Regular sherry, whether it is sweet or dry, is delightful. It carries with it a sense of old-world sophistication, of learned culture, of solid mahogany furniture and red-leather chairs.
Cooking sherry, on the other hand, is virtually undrinkable.
Sherry, which gets its name from the Spanish city of Jerez, where it originated, is a wine that has been fortified with extra brandy. Cooking sherry is a sherry that has been fortified with extra salt. The salt helps to preserve it, so you can keep an opened bottle of it for much longer. On the other hand, it also makes it taste disgusting.
Cooking with regular sherry can be tricky, because reducing the wine tends to make it sweeter; for this reason, most recipes call for using a dry or medium-dry sherry. On the other hand, no recipe ever called for a wine that makes food taste salty and gross.
What’s the difference between baking soda and baking powder? Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, which famously turns all fizzy when it is mixed with an acid such as vinegar. You may remember it from grade school, when at least one kid in your science class used a combination of the two, plus red food coloring, to create a volcano. It’s used in baking because it also reacts to the natural acid in such ingredients as buttermilk, honey, molasses, brown sugar and even chocolate and cocoa.
Baking powder is also largely sodium bicarbonate but already has the acid in it in a powdered form such as cream of tartar. All it needs to start the fizzy reaction is a liquid.
In both cases, the reaction produces carbon dioxide gas. In baking, the carbon dioxide bubbles get trapped in the batter or dough, which is what makes the bread or pastry rise.
If you want to create the equivalent of 1 teaspoon of baking powder out of baking soda, mix together ¼ teaspoon baking soda with ½ teaspoon cream of tartar and ¼ teaspoon cornstarch. If you want to use baking powder instead of baking soda, simply use three times as much baking powder as the amount of the soda called for in the recipe.
What’s the difference between evaporated milk and condensed milk? Both products begin as milk that is heated until most of its water evaporates, leaving milk that is thick and highly flavored. With evaporated milk, that is all there is to it. Condensed milk, which is usually specified as sweetened condensed milk, is much the same thing but with a considerable amount of sugar added to it.
You can’t make evaporated milk out of condensed milk, but you can make condensed milk out of evaporated milk. Heat the evaporated milk and stir in 1¼ times as much sugar as evaporated milk (1¼ cups of sugar for every 1 cup of evaporated milk). Keep stirring until the sugar dissolves.
What’s the difference between tomato paste and (canned) tomato sauce? Think of tomato paste as the tomato version of evaporated milk. Tomatoes are cooked, puréed and strained until most of the water is removed. Tomato sauce is cooked for a much shorter time so that less of the water is removed; the result is not nearly so thick. It too is puréed and strained, but seasonings are usually added before it goes into the can.
Can you make tomato sauce from tomato paste? Well, yes. But honestly, it is much easier to just buy a can of tomato sauce.
What is the difference between all-purpose flour and self-rising flour? Most types of flour are distinguished by the amount of protein they contain. The more protein, the harder the flour and the stiffer the resulting baked goods will be. Bread flour, for instance, is between 12 and 14 percent protein, which creates nicely chewy bread. Cake flour, which creates a delicate crumb, is between 6 and 8 percent protein. Pastry flour, which creates baked goods that are soft but not as soft as cakes, is about 8 to 10 percent protein.
All-purpose flour tries to be all things to all people, and with its protein content between 10 and 12 percent it can be used with some measure of success for all types of baking. A cake made with it won’t be as soft, nor a loaf of bread as chewy, but they will both turn out fine for a home cook.
Self-rising flour, which is often used for biscuits, is a bit softer than all-purpose flour with a protein content of 8 to 9 percent. More importantly, it is already mixed with baking powder and salt. It’s self-rising because the baking powder causes the dough to rise without an additional leavener such as, well, baking powder.
According to the folks at King Arthur Flour, you can make your own self-rising flour by mixing 1½ teaspoons of baking powder and ¼ teaspoon salt to every 1 cup of flour.
What’s the difference between sea salt and table salt? As we commonly use the terms today, sea salt is the salt that is left over when seawater is evaporated. It is only lightly processed, so the crystals are larger and rougher than table salt; they are easier to grab with your fingers, can add a bit of crunch to your food if desired and they have more flavor than table salt because they include small amounts of minerals other than ordinary sodium chloride (which is salt).
Table salt comes from a mine. It is processed to remove the other minerals and is ground fine to flow easily out of a salt shaker. In most cases a little iodide is added to help prevent goiter, a thyroid disorder that was a much more common problem before companies began adding iodide to salt. Some chefs don’t use it because they say the iodide affects the taste, but they are the chefs whose customers are more likely to get a goiter.
