Baking Soda vs Baking Powder in Cookies: Two Formulas

One chocolate chip cookie dough written two ways, with baking soda only and with baking soda plus baking powder, in cups and grams. A formula comparison built on published tests, not on bakes of our own.

In published tests, baking soda alone gives chocolate chip cookies more spread and deeper browning. Add baking powder, or swap to it, and the cookie moves toward thicker and cakier, and powder alone also comes out paler.

Most pages on this topic define the two powders and stop. This one gives you a dough to bake. It's a Toll House style chocolate chip cookie, written with baking soda only (version A) and with baking soda plus baking powder (version B), in cups and grams.

One honest limit up front. This is a formula comparison, not a bake-off. Nobody here has baked or tasted these cookies, so every result below is credited to someone else's published test.

• You get the full dough in US measures and grams, with the leavener as the only change.
• You see what published tests report for soda only, powder only and a half-and-half mix.
• You get the sodium the leavener adds per cookie, with the arithmetic shown.

One dough, two leaveners

The two source formulas are not a matched pair. The soda-only one, from Cookies for Days, uses 1 tsp of baking soda. The other, from Desserts on a Dime, uses 1/2 tsp of baking soda and 1/2 tsp of baking powder, but with a different sugar and flour balance. Compare those two bakes and you'd be comparing doughs, not leaveners.

So we kept one dough, the soda-only one, and moved only the leavener. Version A is 1 tsp (4.6 g) of baking soda. Version B is 1/2 tsp (2.3 g) of baking soda plus 1/2 tsp of baking powder, the split Desserts on a Dime uses. The full list and steps are on the recipe card.

Use food-grade, aluminum-free baking soda, and level the spoon. If you want the teaspoon-to-gram detail, 1 tsp baking soda in grams explains why 4.6 g is our working value and where other sources differ. For the general difference between the two powders, see difference between baking soda and baking powder.

The Food Science / Lab Kitchen Note

Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate. It makes gas only when it meets an acid. Baking powder is baking soda packed with a dry acid and starch, and double-acting powder releases its gas in two stages, once when wet and again in the oven's heat.

Chocolate chip dough carries its own acid: brown sugar. We don't put a number on it, because no source we opened gave one. That's why the soda-only formula can work in this dough. In the Cook's Country test, the sugar cookies had no acidic ingredient at all, so the dough there is a different case.

Why does soda change the cookie's shape and color? The Takeout explains it qualitatively, with no pH values. Baking soda raises dough pH, which delays the point where proteins firm up in the oven, so the dough has more time to spread. The added alkalinity also promotes browning and weakens gluten for a more tender cookie.

Now the numbers we can source. Handle the Heat says about 1 tsp of baking powder raises 1 cup of flour, against about 1/4 tsp of baking soda for the same lift, and calls soda about 4 times stronger. It adds that 1 tsp of lemon juice or vinegar neutralizes 1/2 tsp of baking soda.

Here's our own arithmetic with that rule, and it's only a lift rule. Our dough has 2 1/4 cups plus 2 tbsp of flour, about 2 3/8 cups, which works out to about 0.6 tsp of baking soda for lift. The source formula uses 1 tsp, which fits the point above: in cookies, soda is also doing browning and spread. Version B swaps half of that soda for 1/2 tsp of powder, worth about 1/8 tsp of soda by the same rule (our math). So B has less soda and less total lift on paper.

Soda only, powder only, half and half

This table compares published data, not our bakes. Where no source gives a value, the cell says so. Our version B is a half-and-half split by volume, and the published tests don't say exactly how they split theirs.

Tasty also baked a batch with no leavener, which scored 0/10: underbaked, pale and dense. Neither Tasty nor Cook's Country gives quantities, and Tasty gives no oven temperature or bake time. For our own dough, the leavener adds about 35 mg of sodium per cookie in the soda-only version and about 24 mg in the half-and-half version (our math, shown below). We wrote no powder-only formula here, so that cell stays empty.

What the studies and tests show

The one peer-reviewed cookie study we found and opened is Sung and Chen 2017, in the Journal of Food and Nutrition Research. It's a lab study on the AACC 10-54 sugar cookie recipe: 80 g of cake flour with 0.8 g of sodium bicarbonate, which is 1% of the flour weight, baked at 205 C for 10, 15 and 20 minutes, with three replicates per treatment. The control cookie dough's pH fell from 9.1 to 6.2 during baking. In flour-and-water model cookies, the authors attributed the heavier browning by-products they measured with bicarbonate to the higher dough pH. The study is about browning chemistry, not spread, and the sample count isn't fully stated, so we use it only to back up the pH and browning point.

The rest is informal testing. Tasty baked five batches of Toll House dough with the same amount of leavener each time and scored them by tasting panel. Cook's Country baked three batches each of sugar cookies with soda, powder or a 50-50 mix. Both are published tests with panel judgments, not measurements. We found no study that measured cookie spread against leavener, and none of the sources we opened reports spread diameters. If you see a precise spread number for this comparison elsewhere, ask where it came from.

Common mistakes

Swapping powder for soda one to one. In published tests, powder alone gave a paler, puffier, more cake-like cookie with little spread. If you must swap, use the sourced ratio of about 1/4 tsp of soda to 1 tsp of powder per cup of flour, and expect a different cookie, not a copy.

Heaping the soda spoon. Too much soda is a common cause of a metallic, soapy or bitter taste, because extra soda has no acid left to react with. Level the spoon, or weigh 4.6 g for 1 tsp. Mix it evenly into the flour first.

Blaming the leavener when the cookies are flat. Old leavener is a real cause, and Handle the Heat says opened baking soda and baking powder last about 6 to 12 months. But sources disagree on whether powder-only cookies spread little or come out flat, so dough fat and flour balance matter too.

Swaps and what changes

Tips for the dough

Change one thing at a time. If you bake both versions from one batch, split the base by weight before the flour goes in, as the optional steps on the card describe.

Weigh the flour. Cups of flour vary a lot from scoop to scoop, and the dough's spread depends on the fat and flour balance, not just the leavener. The soda needs to be whisked into the flour so it doesn't pocket in the dough.

Portion by weight too. The sources call for about 1 tbsp of dough per cookie, but this dough works out to about 40 g a cookie (our math), so a tablespoon scoop would give you far more than 36. Bake time moves with portion size, so check the edges rather than the clock.

Sodium the leavener adds

Our math, step by step, from two USDA FoodData Central values. Baking soda has 27,360 mg of sodium per 100 g. At 4.6 g per teaspoon, 1 tsp of soda carries about 1,260 mg (27,360 x 0.046). That is the leavener's share of version A for the whole batch, and over 36 cookies it comes to about 35 mg per cookie.

Double-acting baking powder of the sodium aluminum sulfate type has 10,600 mg of sodium per 100 g in the same database, and other powder types differ. We assume 4.6 g per teaspoon for powder, which isn't from the sources opened for this page. That puts 1/2 tsp (2.3 g) of powder at about 244 mg (10,600 x 0.023). In version B, 1/2 tsp of soda adds about 629 mg, so the two leaveners together add about 873 mg per batch, or about 24 mg per cookie.

Salt and the other ingredients add the rest of the sodium, and we give no figure for them here. The per-cookie total on the recipe card is an estimate, not a measurement, and it depends on your brands.

Storing the cookies and the dough

Let the cookies cool completely, then keep them in an airtight container. No cookie storage time is sourced for this recipe, so this page gives none.

Raw dough can wait in the fridge, covered, but no dough storage time is sourced either. Keep the leaveners themselves in closed containers, since Handle the Heat gives about 6 to 12 months once opened.

Where the numbers come from

The tasting scores come from Tasty's five-batch test, and the sugar cookie results from Cook's Country. The swap ratio and the leavener shelf life come from Handle the Heat. The sodium per 100 g values for the leaveners come from USDA FoodData Central records for baking soda and double-acting baking powder, read through a mirror site. The leavener sodium per batch and per cookie is our arithmetic on top of those values. The nutrition on the recipe card is an estimate from typical USDA values.

One variable at a time

If your cookies misbehave, change only the leavener. Keep the dough, the portion weight and the oven the same, then write down what you see in spread, color and texture.