Yeast & Baking

For thousands of years, bakers have been using the single-celled organism yeast to create the soft and chewy food staple bread. Yeast not only helps bread dough rise, but it also aids in developing and strengthening proteins in the dough and adds to its flavor. Yeast may be best known as the agent in bread that makes it rise. When you add yeast to your flour and water mixture, it breaks down the large starch molecules into simple sugars. During this process, the yeast creates carbon dioxide and ethyl alcohol, which makes the air bubbles that causes the bread dough to grow.

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Yeast is the driving force behind fermentation, the magical process that allows a dense mass of dough to become a well-risen loaf of bread. And yet yeast is nothing more than a single-celled fungus. How does it do it?

Yeast works by consuming sugar and excreting carbon dioxide and alcohol as byproducts. In bread making, yeast has three major roles. Most of us are familiar with yeast’s leavening ability. But you may not be aware that fermentation helps to strengthen and develop gluten in dough and also contributes to incredible flavors in bread.

Yeast makes dough rise

The essentials of any bread dough are flour, water, and of course yeast. As soon as these ingredients are stirred together, enzymes in the yeast and the flour cause large starch molecules to break down into simple sugars. The yeast metabolizes these simple sugars and exudes a liquid that releases carbon dioxide and ethyl alcohol into existing air bubbles in the dough.

If the dough has a strong and elastic gluten network, the carbon dioxide is held within the bubble and will begin to inflate it, just like someone blowing up bubblegum. As more and more tiny air cells fill with carbon dioxide, the dough rises and we’re on the way to leavened bread.

Yeast cells thrive on simple sugars. As the sugars are metabolized, carbon dioxide and alcohol are released into the bread dough, making it rise. Scott Phillips.

Yeast strengthens bread dough