Wait a cotton-picking minute

[mme_hardy]

Melissa Clark's New York Times recipe for skillet cornbread.  (Complete with ghastly perky video, if you can stand it)

Ingredients:

12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter

½ cup maple syrup

2 ¼ cups buttermilk

3 large eggs

1 ½ cups yellow cornmeal, fine or medium-coarse grind

½ cup whole wheat flour

½ cup all-purpose flour

1 ½ tablespoons baking powder

1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt

½ teaspoon baking soda
 

Selected quotes:

• Some cornbread falls on the light and fluffy side of the spectrum, sweet enough to pass for dessert. Then there is crisp, lean and salty cornbread, nearly as savory as the fried chicken that often goes with it. This recipe splits the difference.
• Crisp-edged, maple-syrup-spiked and tender-crumbed, a buttered slice works equally well with a drizzle of honey or with hot sauce, or both if you just can’t decide.
• Pay attention to the scent wafting around the kitchen. When it smells like chestnuts roasting on a street corner in December, immediately pour the butter into a bowl to stop the cooking.

If you watch the video -- and I recommend being up-to-date on your insulin first -- you'll discover that Clark chooses both the cornmeal grind and the whole-wheat flour because they add sweetness.

Bless your heart, honey, if you want a cake, make a cake. 

Comments

[mme_hardy]

It's reasonably common, although I couldn't tell you what the reasoning is behind it. Some recipes for desserts do, some don't.

[ellen_fremedon]

I think the reasoning is that the baking soda cancels the acidity of the buttermilk, so that the baking powder has a ph-neutral dough to work on. Same reason dutched cocoa-flavored cakes can be leavened with baking powder alone, but natural cocoa needs baking powder.

[mme_hardy]

Thank you! I've never known.

[ellen_fremedon]

And of course that comment should say 'natural cocoa needs baking soda.'

[perennialanna]

Dutched cocoa is one of those things that sends British cooks to Google in a panic - we get cocoa powder, unspecified. Some brands are noticeably more chocolatey, but that's mostly about price. (Double action baking powder is another occasion to google, over here baking powder is baking powder is baking powder).

[adrian_turtle]

Baking soda reacts with an acid ingredient (in this recipe it's buttermilk; in muffins it's often juice or fruit puree) to make bubbles and leaven the dough. If you wait too long, or stir too much, between "baking soda touches buttermilk" and "dough cooks," the bubbles will deflate.

Baking powder makes bubbles in the heat of the oven. So if you forgot to preheat your oven and had to let the dough sit around after mixing? The baking-soda bubbles would be gone, but you'd still get some leavening from the baking-powder bubbles. It's a useful backup for that kind of thing going wrong. And if everything goes right, then you have both kinds of bubbles leavening the cake. You end up with a different texture if you blow bubbles in a liquid and make the bubbly liquid stiffen up, than if you blow bubbles in goo that is already partly-solidified.

[mme_hardy]

Thank you! I was a bit confused because IIRC double-acting baking powder is a mix of baking soda and something else. Or maybe that's just the out-of-baking-powder substitution (baking soda + cream of tartar + salt).

[caulkhead]

I always thought baking powder + cream of tartar *was* baking powder, it just saved the mixing. Fascinating.

[mme_hardy]

According to Wiki, it depends on the manufacturer. (I'm fascinated to find out about Rumford.)

Common low-temperature acid salts include cream of tartar and monocalcium phosphate (also called calcium acid phosphate). High-temperature acid salts include sodium aluminium sulfate, sodium aluminum phosphate, and sodium acid pyrophosphate.[9]
Rumford Baking Powder is a double acting consumer product that contains only monocalcium phosphate as a leavening acid. With this acid, about two-thirds of the available gas is released within about two minutes of mixing at room temperature. It then becomes dormant because an intermediate form of dicalcium phosphate is generated during the initial mixing. Further release of gas requires the batter to be heated above 140 degrees F.[10]