Potash is a traditional baking ingredient for Christmas cookies. The raising agent ensures that even heavy dough rises and becomes fluffy despite nuts, honey and fruit. Here you can find out how to use potash for baking.

Honey, nuts, and dried fruit can make dough heavy. Potash is often used here: It is a special raising agent that has a very special effect. In contrast to yeast and sourdough, which allow dough to rise, dough made with potash is wider and slightly looser.

Potash: ingredients of the leavening agent

Potash is potassium carbonate (potassium salts of carbonic acid). As a baking ingredient and as a raising agent, it is also referred to as potassium carbonate and has the E number E 501. The food additive is permitted without maximum quantity restrictions and is tasteless and odorless.

In the run-up to Christmas, potash is available in almost all supermarkets and at Christmas markets. You rarely find them there outside of the Christmas season. But potash is usually also available in pharmacies.

Using Potash: Tips for Baking

Potash is a baking ingredient with a long tradition: it has been used for centuries as a leavening and loosening agent, for example in ginger nuts, honey cake, various types of cookies and gingerbread.

Gingerbread in particular benefits from the special effect of potash: If you want to process gingerbread into a gingerbread house, the individual “components” must not be too thick. Rather, they should be broader. Make sure, however, that you leave enough space between the gingerbread and a generous distance from the edge of the baking sheet. Of course, this also applies to cookies and other pastries that you bake with potash.

More tips for baking with potash:
Dissolve potash in some liquid (water, milk, egg) before adding it to the dough. As with cornstarch, the driving force also unfolds optimally with potash.
Do not store potash with other spices. The powder absorbs other smells and flavors very easily.
Potash has a very long shelf life after opening. Outside of the Christmas season, you can also use it for other cookies and cakes that you don’t want to rise.
Together with deer horn salt, another raising agent used in Christmas baking, potash gives honey cake and gingerbread their typical, spicy taste. If you use potash together with staghorn salt, dissolve both substances separately and work them into the dough one at a time.
Dough with potash can be left at room temperature for up to two days. This is particularly recommended for heavy dough such as honey cake dough. Unlike baking powder, potash does not lose its raising power when exposed to humidity.