Can i use baking powder instead of soda?
You may, but it will taste different. In the good old days baking powder used to be a mixture of soda (sodium bicarbonate) and cream of tartar. However, the modern baking powder is differently constituted and is ‘double acting’, that is, it reacts initially when you add it to wet ingredients and then again when the mixture reaches a higher temperature. Soda reacts as soon as you add certain acidic ingredients to produce CO2, which will help the mixture rise, but it is single acting, i.e.there is no additional rise once the compound has reacted. The main reason some recipes use soda, instead of baking powder, seems to be for the flavour. While soda of course doesn’t taste great, it does impart a very distinctive flavour to some things, like soda bread or some biscuits, which you might miss if you use normal baking powder. Otherwise it should be fine.
