If you love to bake, have you ever considered the role that
yeast plays in your recipes?
Well today on WTF, we're going to take a look at two types of yeast:
Instaferm red and Instaferm gold.
We're going to make two great recipes: a classic focaccia and a
not-your-grandma's monkey bread.
Hello, and welcome to WTF where we transform food here in the
Modernist Pantry test kitchen.
I'm chef Scott Garren, and I'm Janie Wang, the owner of Modernist Pantry.
Today, Scott and I are going to be talking all about instant yeast, which
is such a cool product to use in the kitchen when you're baking breads.
So Scott, what is the difference between instant yeast versus, which
I think most of us are familiar with, and active dry yeast?
So active dry yeast is probably the one that most people are familiar with
because you get that in the grocery store.
That's the most common one.
The active dry yeast, you will need to mix with water and you'll allow
it to prove up a little bit before you add it to your bread recipe or
add your flour, everything like that.
Instant yeast, you can mix directly in with the flour and then make your recipe.
So it actually cuts down a little bit of time, which usually it
takes about 10 minutes for active, dry yeast to really prove up.
And with instant yeast, like I said, mix it directly in and then you're able to go.
And we actually have two different types of instant yeast:
Instaferm gold and Instaferm red.
All right.
And what is the difference between them?
So, Instaferm red can be used with most lean doughs.
It can also be used with some sweet doughs, but not every single sweet dough.
And that's where Instaferm gold comes in.
And this is where a lot of the confusion happens.
So when you have dough that has more than 5% sugar content, and that's
5% to the total weight of the flour, that's generally bakers' ratios.
You'd be able to figure it out there.
That yeast can, or I'm sorry, that sugar can kind of impede ability to prove up.
It saps some of the water away.
The water is what makes the yeast actually grow.
And this is called an osmotolerant yeast.
And what that does is this actually thrives in those sweet environments.
So with that extra bit of sugar, it's able to, you know, prove up properly
and it actually works nice and fast.
So that's, that's a good, good property of the gold.
If you're just making a lot of lean doughs, something like this focaccia
here, the red will work perfect for you.
All right.
And how much yeast do you typically use in a recipe?
I know each of these is about a pound, so this is plenty of yeast here.
How much can we make with each one of these bricks?
So if you were using this yeast, just in straight dough method, with no
starter, anything like that, these can make between 96 and a hundred loaves.
In this recipe, we have something like four grams for this entire loaf.
And that goes through like a fermentation process overnight.
With the, the monkey bread, this goes through a much shorter process
so we use a little bit more yeast.
I believe it's around 17 or 18 grams for the entire recipe.
So there's a difference, you know, between the recipe that you're doing to
how much do you use to going to need.
Okay.
And I, I love what you've made here today, so I'm excited to hear you talk about it.
Where would you like to start?
Let's start with the focaccia first.
We'll work over here, because then we can talk a lot about this.
And I think that the, the monkey bread's kind of a show stealer, so
let's, let's save that one for the end.
We added some, four grams, like I said, to the total weight of the recipe.
And this is just a little half batch here.
And what we did is we let this sit overnight.
And you can see all those little air bubbles in there.
Right?
And what that is, this recipe actually has diastatic malt powder, which we had
in one of our earlier episodes, which you could find in the description below.
And diastatic malt powder contains amylase.
And amylase eats up those starches and it creates small amounts of sugar.
Yeast loves to eat sugar.
Obviously with what we talked about, too much sugar can kind of impede
it, but little bits of sugar that's created by that amylase, it'll eat it
up and it'll create carbon dioxide.
Right.
And those are what you see, those little bubbles.
And that's what gives bread its signature structure.
It's trapped in between all the starch and the gluten.
And if you want to hold this, feel how light that, that's a large piece
of bread, but it's nice and light.
It's super fluffy.
Yes.
And there's also, I took some roasted garlic and I stuffed it down in
there for, for our health, of course.
So we're able to get, you know, a lot of that nice, beautiful structure out
of a small amount of the yeast here.
And this recipe will be available on the blog or in the description below.
That's wonderful.
And so, how long from start to finish did this process take?
'Cause I remember you saying it took how many hours to prove it?
It can take anywhere from 18 to 24 hours, depending on what you're doing.
And that, that brings up a good concern is that eventually this yeast will have eaten
all the starch and all the sugars, and then it will start to, start to die off.
So if you're making something that requires a starter, you can
use this yeast to make a starter.
You can use a small amount of this yeast, actually.
And every day you're going to have to feed it.
You're going to have to add that sugar because over time it's going
to, you know, populate that dough.
Some of it will die off.
But you're going to have to keep regenerating that yeast just naturally
by feeding it and it will create more.
Yeah.
And this focaccia looks perfect.
Can't wait to dig into this.
And I love, I love that you stuffed it with garlic.
Yes.
So yeah, the recipe on the blog is just a basic focaccia.
You can put whatever you want on it.
You know, you can put herbs, rosemary, more olive oil if
you want, roasted garlic.
So it's really up to you.
So it's a basic focaccia that you can stuff with all sorts of great things.
Wonderful.
And what's this other one?
So this is monkey bread.
And we took, it's kind of a caramelized monkey bread, is we took the idea of
monkey bread, which is kind of scraps of a croissant dough that you take
and you would mix just cinnamon and sugar into it, and then you'd bake it.
One downfall is I never found that monkey bread was as crispy as I wanted it to be.
Right.
And I took the idea of a kouign-amann, which is a, basically croissant dough
that's rolled in cinnamon sugar and it's baked and it makes like this
real crispy glaze on the bottom.
So we took the ideas from those and we actually made caramel.
And we found this worked the best.
We were to make a caramel, we added a good amount of salt and
some cinnamon to the caramel.
And then we tossed the pieces of dough in that caramel, stuffed
them into muffin tins, so they're all individual monkey breads.
And you can see all these crispy, gooey glaze bits.
And on the top, just a little bit more of that caramel so when you cook it,
it's not just crispy from the dough, it's crispy from that nice caramel.
And this is a delicious recipe.
It's basically a once-a-month type of recipe, just because of the amount of
fat in it, but it's a delicious thing.
And we're really proud of this recipe.
Yeah.
And if you do want to see Scott make this recipe, we do have a video
up on our Instagram and Facebook.
So follow us on social media.
You can get kind of the behind-the-scenes on how do you make this monkey bread.
Then of course, the recipe in the link in the description below.
Yeah.
And there's one more thing.
So storage, as you can see these come in there, they're vacuum-sealed.
If you happen to get it, and it is not vacuum-sealed, that's totally fine.
The best thing you want to do is take that, you could put it into a container
and you can toss it in the freezer.
That's where I like to keep all my yeast anyways.
In the freezer, you're going to be able to hold these for a very long time,
up to a year, if you want, possibly more, as long as it's sealed properly.
Because if any moisture starts to get to these, you know, it
could potentially activate.
If it's really humid out, you don't want to leave it
uncovered or anything like that.
And you want to take care of your product anyway.
So, throw it in the freezer in a nice sealed container.
If you put it into a Mason jar, that works great in the freezer.
Okay, great.
So now you have two wonderful options for the instant yeast to use in your recipes.
You know, I strongly recommend trying both of these, but if you do already
have a recipe, can they just swap out the active dry for the instant?
So the active dry, yes.
You can swap them out for all of them.
Obviously with the active dry, your recipe is going to say, put
it into water, allow it to proof up before adding in your flour.
You can just change it by adding these yeast directly into the flour in the
recipe and go about it as normal.
Just, you know, anything to do with yeast, you always want to
make sure you understand it.
So you don't want to put like boiling water or anything.
Recipes will never call for that.
But if this gets above, I believe, 138 degrees, that's like the
thermal death point of yeast.
It will just stop working.
So you want to keep it nice and low, really pay attention
and understand how yeast works.
'Cause it's a great, it's actually an amazing ingredient that was
found hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, if not thousands.
And we still are using it today and we're still finding out great ways to use it.
So just take care of it and understand it and learn about it.
Well, that's a wonderful way to finish off.
So if you do want to give it a shot, each one of these one pounders will
make 96 loaves, which is plenty for you to experiment with, with our
recipes or with your own recipes.
So definitely send us any questions you have in the comments below.
Happy to answer them.
And from here in the Modernist Pantry test kitchen, I'm Janie Wang.
And I'm Scott Garren.
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