Baking Soda? Baking Powder? Ahhh!

Erika and I decide we need to add some leavening back to our kitchen so we can bake since it was all tossed out during the Days of Unleavened Bread. It may seem like a simple enough task, however in Thailand this proves to be more difficult. We head to Macro, which is like a Costco or Sam's Club except that it is cash only and you don't have to have a membership. They had to go for our school and it seemed like an ideal place to look for leavening agents. We search up and down the isle looking for Sodium Bicarbonate/ Baking Soda and Baking Powder. We find what claims to be baking powder! Yay! Sadly though, no baking soda. We call a friend to find out how to say it in Thai to ask someone there and they lead us to the bags of baking powder. We realize this is all we are going to get at Macro. 

This just doesn't work since we wanted to bake cookies for the students as a Sabbath treat and it calls for, you guessed it baking soda! We look up baking soda and baking powder conversions on trusty google. Baking powder can be used in place of soda, but not the other way around. We decide to go ahead and try it. Well, the "baking powder" looked like soda and tasted like it too. We went ahead and decided to bake them as if we were using powder as a substitute after much deliberation. The students still loved them, but they weren't just right. A little on the salty side. Not bad, but not right. 

We still have a dilemma... not sure whether we were sold baking soda under the pretense of baking powder. Or if in actuality, it is baking powder. We will buy baking soda when we finally find and see if they are the same. 

It made me laugh pretty hard just the fact that you can't purchase something and trust the label to be correct. This confusion is increased by the fact that the Thai word is the same for both baking soda and baking powder. 

Ahhh... the joys of living in another country. :) 

Hope this brought a smile to your day as it brought lots of laughing to ours. 

-Lainy J.