Gluten-Free Yeast

Appears in
The Everyday Art of Gluten-Free: 125 Savory and Sweet Recipes Using 6 Fail-Proof Flour Blends
The Everyday Art of Gluten-Free

By Karen Morgan

Published 2014

  • About

Yeast is a live, naturally occurring, microscopic fungus that consumes sugar and produces carbon dioxide. This CO2, building up inside dough as thousands of tiny bubbles, makes the dough rise and gives the resulting bread its light, airy feel. The wonderful aroma in a kitchen as bread is rising is, in part, the rich smell of yeast going to work.

Yeast, the traditional biological leavening, goes back to time immemorial. In commercial form, it’s usually sold as active, or highly active, dry yeast, which is granular but dissolves quickly in liquid. In some markets, it’s occasionally still sold in moist cakes, but dry yeast is now pretty much the standard.