Baking Soda In French Bicarbonate De Sodium

Baking Soda In French Bicarbonate De Sodium

Baking powder
Baking powder, called levure chimique in French, is readily available in nearly all French supermarkets and neighborhood grocery stores. It is generally sold in small packets containing 11g, or roughly 1 Tablespoon, of baking powder, such as these:

These packets are packaged together by 5 and cost about 0.70€ for the lot (55g total), depending on the brand. Personally, I find that a little expensive for just 5 Tablespoons of baking powder! After all, that works out to nearly 13€/kilo!

One day, I was walking through my local Tang Frères, a France-based chain of Asian supermarkets, and I came across this:

A 1-kilo tub of baking powder! Sure, that's a lot of baking powder to buy at once, but being the avid baker that I am, I would rather have too much on hand than not enough. And the price? 6.45€ for the tub. In other words, about half the cost of a kilo of little packets.

Baking soda
Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) is called bicarbonate de soude in French. When I first came to France and asked for this product in the supermarkets, people looked at me like I was crazy! No one had ever heard of baking soda, so my only solution was to buy it at American specialty shops, which got a little expensive.

But as I was shopping at Tang Frères that day (the same day I found the baking powder), this plain white tub caught my eye – 1 kilo of baking soda for 4.95€!

In recent years, as the popularity of "green" cleaning has increased, baking soda has become more common. Many stores now stock it in the cleaning products aisle. It's still not very widely used in baking, probably because baking soda is viewed mainly as a cleaning product. And how could any "cleaning product" be used safely in food? But American desserts are "in" right now, and I noticed that some supermarkets are beginning to stock baking soda in the baking products aisle, where it is called bicarbonate alimentaire (dietary baking soda). You can expect to pay roughly 3.50€-4€ for a 500g box. But take note, depending on the brand and the supermarket, some stores charge different prices for household baking soda and "dietary" baking soda, even though it's the same product!

Molasses
Mélasse is nowhere to be found in French supermarkets, unfortunately. I have only been able to find it in American specialty shops for nearly 10€ a jar! However, on a recent trip to The Netherlands, I was eating in a pancake house and I decided to try their pancake syrup.

Pancake syrup©vangilse.nl

I was pleasantly surprised to see how close it was in color and taste to molasses! It's a little thinner than regular molasses, but it will do in a pinch and costs a lot less. I found the same syrup in a Dutch supermarket for about 1€ per 500mL, so I bought a couple of bottles to bring home with me. I have also seen it for sale online for anywhere from 2€ to 5€ a bottle.

The only place I have seenit in France was at the grocery store located at our summer vacation campground last year. It was a little pricey (chalk it up to tourist season at a campground), but still worth it.

Shortening
It took me years to find a product equivalent to shortening! Whenever I would ask for it in the supermarkets, they would invariably try to sell me either saindoux (pork lard) or margarine. Then one day, someone suggested I try végétaline (Végétaline, like Crisco or Kleenex, is a brand name that has become a common, household name for the product itself, regardless of brand). Success! This was the shortening I had been looking for, and it had been sitting right next to the margarine all this time! The only real difference is that Crisco is made primarily from hydrogenated soybean and palm oils, whereas Vé gétaline (or in this photo, Croustifrites) is made from hydrogenated coconut oil.

So why did no one recommend végétaline to me sooner? I'm not sure exactly. My best guess is that it stems from the fact that the French only use végétaline for frying. They never use shortening for baking, the thought would never occur to them. I have often shared recipes with friends and coworkers, and if shortening is on the list of ingredients, the reaction is always "Seriously? Végétaline?".

Sugar, brown
Okay, I'm just going to say it. Regardless of what your English-French dictionary says, brown sugar and cassonade are NOT the same things! Cassonade, while light brown in color, is sugar which has been slightly refined (less so than white sugar, of course). I have tried replacing brown sugar with cassonade in several recipes, but I was never satisfied with the results. I prefer to use Sucre de canne complet du Pérou (whole cane sugar from Peru) marketed by the fair trade brand Ethiquable:

It is sugar which has not been processed and still has all of its molasses, giving it that familiar "wet sand" texture. It's not cheap (about 2.70€ per 500g), but it's the real deal.

In a pinch, you can also make your own brown sugar by mixing 1 cup of white sugar with 1 Tablespoon of molasses (2 Tbsp. for dark brown sugar).

Source: https://myexpatkitchen.wordpress.com/equivalents-substitutions/

Posted by: utherheltaked.blogspot.com

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