BICARB HACKS
Humble baking soda is all you need to solve these common household problems
Make bread without yeast
The bubbles that make bread dough light and airy are most often made by yeast, a single-celled organism that consumes sugar and produces carbon dioxide, but you can still make a decent loaf without it. Soda bread is a traditional quick bread with four key ingredients: flour, bicarbonate of soda, salt, and an acid like buttermilk, milk, yogurt or cream of tartar. The soda reacts with the acid to make carbon dioxide, allowing the bread to rise. But be careful with the proportions; the bread will collapse if the bubbles become too big, and too much bicarbonate of soda can make the mix taste soapy.
Banish fridge odours
Bicarbonate of soda has the chemical formula NAHCO3, and it’s got some special properties. It is amphoteric, which means it can react with both acids and bases, and this makes it a great DIY fridge deodouriser. Lots of bad food smells are caused by acids and alkalines produced as food starts to go off; sour milk contains lactic acid, bad meat contains rancid fatty acids, and rotten fish contains alkaline trimethylamine oxide. When bicarbonate of soda reacts with these, it forms a sodium salt, water and carbon dioxide, neutralising the odour. An open box inside the fridge door should help to keep bad smells at bay.
Refresh tarnished silver
Silver can lose its lustre over time, becoming coated in a layer of black silver sulphide, but there’s a chemistry trick to gently restore its shine. The first thing to do is line a bowl with aluminium foil and then add a spoon of baking powder, a pinch of salt and some hot water. The bicarbonate of soda will react with the foil, stripping away the layer of aluminium oxide on the surface, while the salt allows electrons to move between the foil and the silver, creating a small electrical current. The silver gains electrons and the aluminium loses them and, in the process, the sulphur transfers from your cutlery to the foil.