Hartshorn

An example of delicious cookies you could be making right now using the horn of a deer.

HARTSHORN. The word stared out at me from the King Arthur Flour catalog. Our Baker's Ammonia, it said, can be used in recipes that call for Hartshorn. I'd never heard of this, and the fact that they anticipate you needing to substitute their product for it indicated to me that either: a) it was an ingredient no longer readily available, or b) it was an ingredient found to be unhealthful or dangerous. Turns out it was both!


Hartshorn, also called baker's ammonia or baker's salt, is named for the way it was initially produced: as a distillation of a hart's horn, or the antler of a male red deer. Bones were also used, but probably they realized hartsbone was not as cool sounding and/or sounded more like an adult film. If you see it called for in a recipe, it's most likely going to be an old Greek, Scandinavian, or German recipe. It was made from hartshorn oil, which, along with hartshorn jelly (used to treat dysentery, among other things) and spirits of hartshorn (used as a detergent), represented the entire diversified hartshorn product line.

Brandon, chairman and CEO of  Hornin' In On This, the entertainment division of Hartshorn Industries.

It was one the first chemical leaveners used in baking, along with pearl ash (which was made by taking the ash from burned plant matter, soaking it in water, then draining the liquid and drying the ash down to a powder a.k.a. magic). A chemical leavener, for the uninitiated, is simply an additive that speeds up a dough's natural rising time using chemical reactions, like baking soda or baking powder.

So what happened to hartshorn? Well, a couple of things. Those chemical leaveners without cool names (the aforementioned baking soda and baking powder) showed up. Hartshorn was simply overtaken. Even in recent years the production of it is only around 7000 tons. By comparison, baking soda sales usually hover somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 tons annually.

But in addition to this, the chemical compound that makes up hartshorn, ammonium carbonate, releases ammonia during the baking process. This is one of the reasons that ammonium carbonate is used primarily in thinner baked goods: they allow the ammonia to better escape. Thicker doughs can trap the ammonia, not only imparting a mild ammonia taste to the finished product, but also increasing ingestion of ammonia, which is generally something we try to avoid.

And when ammonia interacts with fructose and glucose molecules in dough, it creates weird intermediate molecules. These molecules in turn can react with an amino acid called asparagine (found in whole grains, fruits, and nuts) to create acrylamide, which is a known carcinogen. Now, the jury's still out as to how much risk is associated with acrylamide. The discovery of acrylamide in fried starchy foods in 2002 caused a lot of hubbub, but it's been hard to get a handle on how much risk it represents to humans, as you pretty much can't find a control group of people not stuffing fried foods into their face. That's my theory, at any rate.