Frogg,

I pulled this off breadbaking911 website.  When I lived in France boulangers (bread bakers) were allowed to use ascorbic acid, in small amounts, in their bread baking, mostly baguettes, batards, etc.

Howard - St. Augustine, FL

1/ Vitamin C (aka Ascorbic acid, or its salts such as Sodium Ascorbate) is readily available.

In London!

Tablets have (hopefully) accurate amounts - typically 500mg (1/2 a gram) per tablet.

Unless you have unusually accurate scales, measuring 1/4 gram or thereabouts for a loaf is much more difficult than cutting a tablet in half.

But if you are prepared to measure out small fractions of a gram, then you can buy a smallish (170 gram) jar of pure Vitamin C powder from Holland & Barrett (the High Street "health food" shop).

http://www.hollandandbarrett.com/pages/product_detail.asp?pid=119

£6.49 for 170g currently... that's enough for 700 loaves or so... so the cost is below 1p per loaf.

2/ I've seen it mentioned that 25ppm or so is sometimes pre-added to white flour as an 'improver'. (ppm is milligrams (1/1000g) per kilo). It is even permitted as an improver in "Organic" flour.

Dan Lepard proposes using 250mg to 450g of wholemeal flour. So that's almost 20x as much as routine addition to white flour.

It seems he started by adding a splash of orange juice (when he couldn't get decent flour abroad) ...

... so orange flavour fizzy tablets are not to be automatically ruled out! (You can dissolve the tablet in the water, long before you add the water to the dough, or grind it up really fine.)

3/ Vitamin C (and its family of ascorbates and erythrobates) are anti-oxidants (ie reducing agents).

That is why they are usually added to foodstuffs.

But their action on dough is much more than that.

And massively more than the addition of a minute quantity of acid.

Dan mentioned Vitamin C in his Wholemeal Loaf recipe in the last November's Guardian Guide to Baking.

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/guides/baking/story/0,,2213370,00.html

He says that Vit C is an antagonist for Glutathione, which is described by others including Dr Emily Buehler http://www.twobluebooks.com/book.php as being much more prevalent in wholemeal than white flour.

My understanding is that Glutathione (notably also found in 'Active Dry' yeast, resulting from dead yeast cells) acts to make the gluten more 'floppy' - less strong but more extensible. In making the flour 'weaker', it reduces the rise height that the dough can support - making for a denser loaf.

You might also be interested in this (PDF) academic paper from 1995 (one of whose authors is the celebrated cereal chemist RC Hoseney)

http://www.aaccnet.org/cerealchemistry/backissues/1995/72_58.pdf 

EDIT : The paper quantifies and "discusses" (ie proposes explanations for) the effect of Vitamin C, Bromate and Glutathione on dough strength, elasticity and extensibility ("rheology") -- also mentioning (and offering an explanation for) ascorbic acid's greater effectiveness than its mirror-image-twin ("optical isomer") erythrobic acid. For any baker of a scientific mind, its very well worth a look.

4/ I have a cheap 0.01g digital scale (less than £20 a couple of years back, inc calibration weight and delivery). It was bought originally for weighing out Nitrate and Nitrite for ham and bacon curing. And Vitamin C is useful in bacon curing too. So I bought a jar at H & B.

Used at the sort of strength Dan Lepard proposes, I think it does give a lighter (better-risen) wholemeal loaf. 

One tsp. of vinegar for up to 10 cups of flour really helps the bread rise.  You could add a little more and it won't affect the taste at all.

Check out Dolf's blog..he uses ascorbic acid in his formula.  Good stuff !

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/6345/multigrain-oatmeal-sandwich-bread

In the new SFBI book, Suas mentions that using ascorbic acid for a green flour (one that hasn't been aged) helps immediately increase dough strength.  I enjoy using freshly ground whole grains; I've thought of using ascorbic acid to help make better-risen loaves, just never experimented.  So I'm grateful for all this info, too!

SOL

Fantastic information....very helpful, thank you so much.