Baking soda is a nickname for sodium bicarbonate. It’s made from soda ash, also known as sodium carbonate. To make the stuff in the orange box, soda ash is mined in the form of an ore called trona. Chemistry ensues. The result is NaHCO3. The Damsel doesn’t understand these kinds of things but is grateful there are people in this world who can take care of chemistry related items for her.

Sodium bicarbonate works because it reacts with acid components to release carbon dioxide bubbles. (Think baking soda + vinegar = science fair volcano) Those bubbles get trapped in dough and so on, and causes it to rise. And, it has this cool property that at baking temperatures, it doesn’t need the acid partner to release the bubbles. So when you’re mixing up a cake, it releases the bubbles when it gets baking-hot but not before.  Apparently that’s good. The Damsel guesses premature bubble formation wouldn’t work out so well for the cake.

In case you’re wondering about man-made chemicals in food, baking soda is a natural thing to put in your body. Your body even makes it, in dissolved form, to counter your strong stomach acid. So no worries there.

In another post, the Damsel will instruct the class on a few of the bajillion uses for the stuff.

A shoutout to Helen, the Damsel’s adorable Australian friend. She sent chocolate all the way from the land down under. Such actions deserve public praise and adulation. There is great joy at the Cottage by the Mountains!

Sometimes it’s easy to figure out if using an old school tactic saves you money. Thinking only of monetary cost, if you buy a thrift shop sweater for $2, unravel it as we did here, and then knit it into 20 washcloths, (mercy!) you could easily figure out the savings. Divide the number of washcloths into the cost, and you see you’ve paid 10 cents for each washcloth. Subtract that from what you normally pay for a washcloth, and there are your savings.

Notice the Damsel said the MONETARY cost. Knitting 20 washcloths could carry an emotional burden.

But what if you’re trying to figure out the cost of a recipe? That can be trickier when you use items from your pantry or food storage. Take homemade bread, for example. How do you figure out how much a cup of flour costs?

First, you need to find out how many cups are in a pound. The old saying about “a pint’s a pound the world around” works pretty well for sugar, but flour is trickier because it can be fluffed or dense. The Damsel turned to Professor Google. A couple of people actually dumped out a 5 lb. bag of flour and measured the cups. The answer was a surprising 3.75 cups per pound. This agrees with the estimate on the King Arthur Flour website.

The Damsel buys flour by the 25 lb. bag. (remember: 7 sprogs) So if there are 3.75 cups per pound, there are roughly 94 cups of flour in one of those bags. To figure out the price of one cup, divide the cost of the bag by the number of cups: $7.00 / 94 = .074. Let’s say 8 cents.

Ow. Math. The Damsel pauses, recalling why she majored in music.

Other products could be figured by using information on the label. This yeast (The Damsel’s favorite) has 48 tablespoons total in the package. It cost $3.50, so the cost per tablespoon is .07. ($3.50 / 48)

The Damsel has a favorite french bread recipe that calls for 13 cups flour and 3 tablespoons yeast, plus water and salt. (Future post alert!) To make this recipe, it costs $1.04 for the flour (13 x .08) and .21 for the yeast. The Damsel draws the line at figuring out how much a little salt costs. Add a penny if you like. So $1.26. This recipe makes 5 loaves, so the cost is .25 per loaf, not including the cost to run the oven.

Armed with this information, you can make an informed decision. There are several things to weigh out. Cost is just one. Is the homemade product fresher, yummier, or chemical-free? Do you get satisfaction out of making something yourself? Are you able to tailor it to your family’s taste or size?

Then there’s the Homemade Bread Smell Factor. You’re on your own for totaling that up.

But what kind is best?

When you go wheat shopping, you’re likely to run into a few confusing terms. Hard, white, red, soft, winter, spring . . . what does it all mean, and does it matter?

In the olden days, which by this the Damsel means twenty-plus years ago, pretty much the only kind of wheat people bought for storage was called “hard red wheat,”  sometimes called “red winter wheat” or even “turkey red wheat.” No one will tell the Damsel why the turkey thing.

Ever notice what a weird word turkey is? Turkey turkey turkey. Say it a few times and pretty soon you’re laughing for no reason.

The hard red kind is great because it stores like, forever. People love to tell the story about a guy finding some of it in a pyramid that was 2,000 years old and it still sprouted. Also, it has a high protein content so that’s good.

Other types, such as soft white wheat, are used by bakeries who don’t care about being able to store wheat for 2,000 years, and yield a–you guessed it–softer, whiter product.

So, people have stored the hard red kind, and try to make bread from it in an effort to become self-sufficient and to rotate the blasted stuff. But the Damsel admits she has seen, on more than one sad occasion, grown women break down and cry in the attempt.

It’s not impossible. But it ain’t easy, especially since the folks who eat it are accustomed to fluffy white bread rather than rough peasant loaves.

Then, in 1986, a farmer in Montana cross-bred the two types of wheat and came up with a new wheat that had both the storability and protein content of the hard red wheat and the lighter flavor and “fluffiness” of the soft white type. It’s come to be called “hard white wheat” and has gained huge popularity among wheat storage enthusiasts.

Yes, there is such a thing as a “wheat storage enthusiast.”

The hard white wheat is a lot easier to make bread with. Those same sad women who cried over their door-stop loaves of red wheat bread, cried tears of joy when they tried again with hard white wheat. It was as if their femininity was affirmed. Crikey!

Now, to be sure, some people prefer the nuttier, “darker” taste of red wheat. But if you’re a wheat buying novice, the Damsel will bet 99 turkeys that you’d like this newer “hard white” wheat. And–now that it has become more widely known and grown, the price has come way down. You used to have to pay a premium for its light fluffy goodness. No longer.

As for the “spring” and “winter” designations, there is a small protein content difference, but the Damsel advises not getting worked up about it.

So unless you are a red wheat lover, the Damsel says go thou, and buy thyself Hard White Wheat.

The sour cream we made, for example. There’s yogurt. There are also a few soft/farmer style cheeses we could learn. But in order to do that, there’s a couple of things to be clear on.

Some of these things require buttermilk, and apparently there’s two kinds of buttermilk. There’s “old-fashioned,” which is the liquid left over after making butter, and there’s “cultured,” which is something completely different. The Damsel is annoyed they named the cultured kind “buttermilk” because she is easily confused.

Okay, “buttermilk” sounds nicer than “milk left out on the counter until it’s thick and sour” but it’s still confusing.

The Damsel will go as far as to say if a recipe calls for buttermilk, they mean cultured buttermilk. But to make it more confusing, unless there is going to be microbial stuff going on, it doesn’t matter. So if you’re making something that will be baked or cooked, thereby killing said microbes, you could use either type–like in bread or chocolate cake.

But if you are trying to make anything that requires little organisms to grow, like the sour cream thing, it’s gotta be cultured buttermilk. And yes, you can make your own, but it takes some to make some, unless you have access to an unpasteurized milk-beast.

1. Put one part cultured buttermilk in a container, like a quart jar with a lid.

2. Add three parts fresh milk. It can be store bought, pastuerized, right out of the jug. It has no microbes yet, because the pasteurization killed them all, but you’re adding them by mixing in the cultured buttermilk. Bwahaha!

3. Shake or stir.

4. Countertop it. Wait 24 hours or so, but not longer than 36. If it isn’t thick like cream by 36 hours, your bugs were dead. Start over.

5. Refrigerate. It’ll keep well. But don’t use it all…save some back to start the next batch. You can create a never-ending supply of buttermilk throughout the years to come. Just knowing that makes you feel cozy inside, doesn’t it?

Fluffy pancakes will not be denied you.