Making a hash of it with Vitamin C
Hi all. I have a couple of questions about Vitamin C/Ascorbic acid powder.
The first part is a bit of a tale of confusion and woe....
I'm very happy with the "lift" on my white loaves, but my brown and wholemeal were a litle bit heavy, so I bought some Vitamin C powder and started to use it.
Over the last few weeks or months, my brown bread has been getting worse and worse so I've been adding a little more and more of the Vitamin C powder (I'll admit to how much in a minute!)
I've now wbeen reading some previous topics about Vitamin C on here (such as this one: Ascorbic acid [1]) and I am now thouroughly confused about how much to use.
In that topic it says in various places:
1/8 teaspoon per "recipe"
1/4 gram or thereabouts for "a loaf" (I'm guessing a 1lb loaf?)
25ppm or so as an improver for white flour (i.e. 25 milligrams per kilogram- about a TENTH of the amount in quote #2)
And then it says "Dan Lepard proposes using 250mg to 450g of wholemeal flour. So that's almost 20x as much as routine addition to white flour."
So is 1/2 gram per kilo of wholemeal flour about right? Any idea of what that would be in fractions of a teaspoon?
(OK - time to confess now... I'm sure I read somewhere that it should be a teaspoon per loaf, so I was being stingy and only putting in one full teaspoon per kilo of flour.
As they got flatter and flatter, I was slowly making it a bigger and bigger heaped spoonful!
I think I was lucky the poor yeast was surviving at all!)
Second part of the question....
I can't remember where I found the Vitamin C powder and can't find it anywhere now.
But I can get Citric Acid powder. I know that citus fruits have citric acid and they are high in vitamin C, but is that all spurious? Could I use Citric Acid powder instead of Ascorbic Acid????
Very grateful for any help or advice.