How do they make yeast?
If we had no yeast, our bread would be flat and heavy. It is yeast that fills a loaf full of spongy holes and makes the bread light. The yeast was made in a huge tub, and it was made from other yeast. For the wonderful stuff is alive and all living things must come from parents just like themselves. The pale powdery yeast is made from tiny little plants though each single plant is too small for our eyes to see. These tiny plants use up food and they multiply. When they have all the things they need, they multiply at a great rate. They like a big tub full of warm broth mixed with sugars and other chemicals. If we add, say, a cupful of yeast plants to the right broth, they begin to grow. Each little sausage shaped plant grows a bud. In about an hour, the bud is a new yeast plant, just like its mother. The cup of yeast we put into the tub has multiplied to two cups. Then the mother and daughter plants grow buds and the buds become more yeast plants. After awhile, our first tap of yeast mu
Yeast, believe it or not, is alive, and the only way to get more of it is to coax it to multiply. A wad of yeast is a mass of single celled plants, too small for our eyes to see individually. They teem everywhere in nature, in air, in soil and moisture. There are numerous different species, most of them shaped like short fat sausages or round balls. Some types live as parasites in animals and other plants. But a few species perform wonders to our bread and bakery foods. Yeasts are single celled cousins of the fungus plants and our useful species are cultured, much as a farmer cultivates his plant crops. Like mushrooms, the tiny cells need warmth and moisture, shade and a very rich diet. They also need air to digest their food, to grow and multiply. When all the conditions are just right, one pound of yeast may become 30 pounds of yeast in about 12 hours. Most commercial yeasts are cultured from types that are suitable for bread making and bakery duties. As a rule, the culture is made i
