Hi everyone welcome to baking school! If you aren't familiar with me I am Kristin
"Baker Bettie" Hoffman and I'm a trained chef and the baking instructor here on
BakerBettie.com. Now I am so excited to bring you this intro to yeast breads
course because I can't tell you how many times my readers tell me that they are
intimidated by baking with yeast so I really wanted to create this course so
that you can feel really confident about baking with yeast and have a lot of fun
with it. Now today I want to talk about some yeast basics we're going to talk
about what yeast is and a little bit about how it works and then we're going
to dive right in to baking our very first loaf of bread because I want you
to see just how easy it truly can be. Now let's talk a little bit about what yeast
is. So yeast is actually a living organism it is a fungus and it is all
around us yeast is floating through the air it is
living in our bodies and it is in a lot of food that we eat. Now the yeast that
we are going to be baking with for this course and the most common type of yeast
for home baking is what is called dried yeast. Now yeast needs two things to
thrive: it needs moisture and it needs a food source. So dried yeast have had
these things removed from it it has had all the moisture taken out of it and so
it is now essentially in a dormant state so I have a little container of dried
yeast here you can see these are very very tiny little cells and all of these
are yeast cells that have been dried and they do not have any moisture in them
so that they are not able to thrive at the moment but they are still alive
they're just essentially asleep so in order to wake these yeast cells up and
begin using them for baking they need to have some moisture introduced to them
and they need a food source. So I'm going to pour some of this yeast into some
water here and I'm going to give it a food source so use yeast feeds on sugars
and it also feeds on starches so it would feed on the starches found in
flour in our bread dough so in order to give this yeast something to feed on I'm
going to add some sugar and then I'm just going to stir this up and give it a
little bit of time now as this yeast wakes up and starts feeding on that
sugar it's going to start creating carbon dioxide gases and we'll start to
see in this water that there will be some bubbles forming and that is just
signs that the yeast is awake and it is feeding and that carbon dioxide gas is
being produced now when this happens in a bread dough that carbon dioxide gas is
what makes the dough rise so we'll check back in on this in a moment once the
yeast starts waking up now I want to talk a little bit about a different few
different kinds of yeast dried yeast that you might bake with so active dry
yeast is kind of the original form of dried yeast now these yeast cells are a
little bit bigger than some of the other types of yeasts that we'll talk about
they function just a little bit slower and the original act of dry yeast did
need to be hydrated in some water before you added it into your bread dough but
they've made some improvements in the way they do make this yeast now and it
actually can just be added right into your dry ingredients it does not have to
be hydrated before you add it into your bread dough but it does function a
little bit slower than the other types of yeast and it takes about twice as
long to rise as the next type of yeast that we're just going to talk about
which is a quick rise yeast now this is also called instant
East and rapid rise yeast now this type of yeast has a little bit smaller yeast
cells and they function a little quicker so your rise time when using the instant
rise yeast as opposed to the active dry yeast is going to be about twice as fast
now these two yeasts can be substituted for each other one for one and pretty
much any bread recipe the only time when you might not want to use a quick rise
yeast or a rapid rise yeast is if you are going to let your shaped dough proof
in the refrigerator for a long period of time now we will talk about that more as
we get into all of our bread making but that would really be the only time when
you wouldn't want to substitute the two now the last type of yeast I wanted to
show you is what is called platinum superior baking yeast now this is made
by a brand called red star yeast and this is the official yeast brand that I
use for all of my baking and for this course and this is a type of instant
rise or rapid rise yeast that has some bread improvers added to it now what
this does is it helps a new Baker not over knead their dough and it also gives
a much better oven spring when you hit the oven so I love this yeast I always
get wonderful results from it and if you are new to baking with yeast I would
definitely recommend finding this yeast and giving it a try now I hear people
say all of the time that they're really worried about killing their yeast in
baking and they're just not really sure what types of things that might kill
their yeast so the one thing that you really do need to be concerned about
when working with yeast is your hot temperatures now a lot of recipes do
specify some pretty specific temperatures when for the liquid for
your bread dough they might say 110 or 115 degrees Fahrenheit now people get a
little bit nervous about this because maybe they don't have a thermometer to
check the temperature so what I would say is definitely always err on the side
of the liquid being too cool rather than too hot so if the liquid is
too hot for you to touch it is definitely going to be too hot for the
yeast now a cooler temperature is not going to kill your yeast it's not going
to ruin your bread dough it just might slow down the process a little bit of
the yeast waking up and really starting to feed and create that carbon dioxide
gas so cool temperatures slow yeast down and then warmer temperatures speed east
up and then eventually it does die once you get to really hot temperatures so I
would always say era on the side of being just a little bit cooler just to
be safe now another thing that might be important to note about working with dry
yeast is you might hear people talk about proofing your yeast
now what proofing your yeast means is it's actually very similar to what we
have just done with pouring our yeast into the liquid and then adding some
food for it to feed on so what you would do when you proof your yeast is you
would add it to the liquid called whore in the recipe and then you would add
just a pinch of sugar now what this does is it wakes your yeast up and will start
letting it feed and this is just kind of a little insurance policy for you to see
that your yeast is actually alive once you see bubbles starting to come up to
the top and that activity in your liquid that is how you know your yeast is alive
now this is completely optional step it's not a hundred percent necessary but
a lot of people do like to do it just to make sure that they're not going to make
their bread dough and then find out later that the yeast wasn't alive okay
so let's look back at our yeast and sugar mixture so you can see here that
there are some bubbles and foam forming on the top and if you watched really
closely you'd start to see bubbles popping up to the top almost like the
mixture is carbonated now this is happening because the mixture truly is
being carbonated as the yeast is feeding it is creating that carbon dioxide gas
and all of that is starting to pop up to the top and this is how you know that
your yeast is alive and feeding so the next lesson after this one is a glossary
of all of the yeast spread terminology that we will be going through in the
course now you are welcome to go ahead and start familiarizing yourself with
all of those words but we will be going over them as they naturally come up in
our yeast bread baking process now after that we're diving right into baking our
very first loaf of bread and it is a no need hearth bread now I cannot wait for
you to bake this bread you are going to be so amazed at how amazing it turns out
and how easy it is to make so I cannot wait to dive in alright I'll see you
guys next time goodbye