Bread - Yeast

So it seems yeast is a bit important to this bread making caper.

I made another loaf this morning and it once again looked ok, didn't rise much, and tasted like glue.

This time hard glue.

It looked like this...

Actually it didn't taste like glue, but rather, tasted like really dense and chewy air.

You can see from the picture it didn't really rise, and I think I discovered why.

This is a glass of warm water with three teaspoons of sugar, three teaspoons of flour, and a teaspoon of the yeast I've been using after it's been sitting for about half an hour.

And this is the same concoction after 10 minutes, but with a freshly opened packet of yeast. The stuff I've been using has been sitting in a jar for a few years.

Apparently it goes off.








Given that the point of the yeast is to eat sugars and excrete carbon dioxide and alcohol (the alcohol evaporates out of the cooked bread but adds to the flavour), it's probably important to not be quite so dead.  The carbon dioxide gets trapped in the bread dough and makes all the bubbles. This makes the bread rise and makes it light and fluffy. So dead yeast, it turns out, equals poorly risen bread.



At 120 Thing in 20 years, we learn from our mistakes when making bread with dead yeast. That's all welll and good, but I'm hungry.