Cooking & Baking
Related: About this forumwolfie001
(7,708 posts)Great channel!
eShirl
(20,286 posts)Old Crank
(7,121 posts)regularly usable for cooks. He standardized the chemical make up and sold it in single use packets.
Enough for 500 grams of flour. A fat pound.
https://www.oetker.com/stories/130-years-baking-powder
As a baker's son, he was aware of how unreliable the usual baking powder worked. Either the dough did not rise properly, the dosage was too high or the taste suffered. Often it just spoiled very quickly. Baking soda wasn't really useful for home users, but something for professionals, like bakers. For baking at home, there were only yeast or bakers ammonia.
Dr. August Oetker heard the lamentations of the women who complained about deficient baking soda. He saw this as a gap in the market. He set out to develop a successfully safe product. With a master baker friend, he was allowed to test various recipes in the bakery. His son, Eduard Müller, reported years later about Dr. August Oetker: "I can still remember the determination with which he tried to achieve an optimal composition of his baking powder. He was not discouraged by initial failures or by the skepticism with which my father and I initially followed his experiments in our bakery."
And success came. Dr. August Oetker found the perfect mixing ratio of the raw materials. But even more ingenious was the idea of selling the baking powder, which he affectionately christened Backin, in portioned sachets. Such a portion of Backin was enough for the guaranteed rise of 500 grams of flour. In addition, there was always a suitable recipe on the back, with which you could get started immediately.
The absolute success of the application and the neutral taste convinced the users. So baking was finally fun! Backin immediately was a bestseller.
surrealAmerican
(11,891 posts)Baker's ammonia was not much used here (except by Scandinavian immigrants), and individual sachets of baking powder were not (and still are not) common.
What was common were recipe pamphlets put out by baking powder manufacturers, and competitive claims about the safety, or lack there of, of competing products.
Old Crank
(7,121 posts)My father in law majored in chemistry at Stanford late in WWII and German was required. Class of 46/47.