How To Substitute Lemon Juice For Cream Of Tartar In Baking

There are some ingredients in the cupboard you might not use often, but you always have them on hand just in case. Think about baking soda. If you don't bake often, you might not always have it in your supplies, but it's a good item to keep in stock for everything from brushing your teeth to making chicken with the crispiest skin ever. And then, when you do get a craving for your favorite cookies, boom — you've got what you need to make a batch.

But what if your favorite cookie recipe is snickerdoodles, and you used up all of your cream of tartar making homemade play dough? Cream of tartar is one of those little-used ingredients that we can never remember if we have on hand or not. We either somehow have three containers of it that go unused for years, or could swear we bought some the last time we were at the store only for it to disappear the day we decide to make meringues. Thankfully, though it's not exactly the same, there are some ingredients that can be used as cream of tartar substitutes, and lemon juice is one of the easiest. When life gives you lemons, you make ... cookies, meringues, and candy, of course.

The first thing to know on your baking substitutions journey is what cream of tartar really is, and what it's used for. It turns out this strange white powder is an acidic byproduct of wine-making, according to Fine Dining Lovers. And it's used in cooking to help leaven baked goods, to keep crystals from forming in sugary recipes, and to stabilize meringues and whipped cream. So, when finding a cream of tartar substitute, it's important to use something with a similar chemical makeup, and luckily, lemon juice fits the bill.

Using lemon juice as a cream of tartar substitute is as easy as adding the same amount of lemon juice as the recipe calls for cream of tartar unless baking is involved. Then use twice as much juice. The method has positive reviews. As one blogger said, "After many different experiments, I found that lemon juice is the perfect substitute for cream of tartar in snickerdoodles" (via Aubrey's Kitchen). However, it might not work quite as well as cream of tartar in every recipe. 

Slate says that just 3% of lemon juice is acid. However, cream of tartar is all acid, making it more effective. Still, it should work in most applications, and if you already cook with lemons regularly (and don't happen to be a winemaker), there's a better chance of having some lemon juice on hand during an impulse baking or meringue-making spree than cream of tartar.