Bread Recipe - yeast question

[Guest guest]

I received a question about the large quantity of yeast in the bread

recipe I posted the other day, and why it doesn't just call for a

packet like other recipes. I thought others might also be interested,

so here was my response:

 

The short answer: This recipe started out as a variation of a recipe

that makes roughly a half-loaf of bread. I quadrupled the yeast to

scale to two loaves, and it worked well.

 

The long answer: I have noticed that many bread recipes use only one

yeast packet regardless of size. This would imply that the actual

quantity of yeast doesn't matter much. However, I have also noticed

that most of the bread recipes seem rather finicky. I think that the

large quantity of yeast helps to ensure good rising, texture, and

" yeasty " bread flavor. Although the large quantity of yeast started

as a naive quadrupling of another recipe, I think it actually serves

to make the recipe come out more consistently good, so I've stuck with

that.

 

Using packets would be expensive. I bought a large bag of Active

Yeast from Bob's Red Mill rather inexpensively, and just use that. If

all you have on hand are the packets, I suspect that you could just

use two packets and it would come out fine.

 

Thanks for asking! Please let me know how it comes out. I strongly

feel that a recipe isn't very useful unless it can be duplicated

successfully by others, so I'm very eager to hear the results in other

kitchens.

 

Mark