The Frying Pan

Jolenealaska

3:25 AM

Sad and lonely in here

Jolenealaska

9:02 AM

Good night all.

Faheem Mitha

1:44 PM

Hi. We have a pizza recipe which uses yeast to make the crust rise. Is baking soda an acceptable substitute?

Faheem Mitha

2:25 PM

And would this be a reasonable question for the main site?

rumtscho

2:42 PM

@FaheemMitha we have lots of questions on yeast and soda

Soda is never a substitute in a yeast dough, they are two completely different beasts.

You can search around for savory pies without yeast dough, but by definition, pizza is made with yeast.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Hmm. Ok, the problem is that here, in Bombay, India, we've had difficulty getting yeast that will rise the dough reliably.

@rumtscho Ok

rumtscho

@FaheemMitha Really? That's sad to hear. I would have expected the producers to have solved this problem.

Do you have access to dry yeast? it is not very susceptible to bad storage, so will rise well even if it spent a long time in non-climatized store rooms.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Unsurprising. India is kind of a loony bin. I feel vaguely surprised when anything looks right.

@rumtscho That might be worth looking into. Do we need to cultivate it before using it?

rumtscho

Cake yeast always works well when it has been kept consistently refrigerated on the way from producer to customer. But I can imagine there are stores in India which put it on a shelf or similar.

@FaheemMitha No, it's very easy to use. For quick working, you can mix it directly with the flour.

You can also make a sponge, just like with cake yeast.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Right. So, why would dry yeast be better, though?

Wouldn't it be worse?

rumtscho

2:47 PM

@FaheemMitha It can be kept on a shelf for months and will still be good when used.

I am assuming standard foil packaging here. The humid heat in India could damage it if it were packaged in porous paper.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Hmm. But they are bacteria. Wonder how they stay alive. Time to do a little reading, methinks.

@rumtscho Agreed. They aren't big on foil packaging here. But worth checking out.

@FaheemMitha That should have been "works right".

rumtscho

All the Western producers use airtight foil for dry yeast. I don't know if there could be a local brand which packages it badly, but I doubt it. Making it is advanced technology, and if a company invested in the equipment, they are probably also good enough to package it right. More likely, and dry yeast you can get is imported.

Yeast are not bacteria, they are fungi.

They are in an active state in cake yeast, a living colony.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Oh, right. Excuse my ignorance.

@rumtscho And dry yeast is dormant?

rumtscho

And if they get enough warmth and humidity, they start growing.

Only there isn't enough food for them in the cake, so they overpopulate their environment and die.

@FaheemMitha exactly.

But it activates in minutes in a dough.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Ok. Sounds like a plan. Thanks.

@rumtscho I see.

So, the standard term is dry yeast?

rumtscho

2:52 PM

Yes, that's what it's called.

The ratio is 1/3 of g of dry yeast for each gram of cakeyeast the recipe specifies

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Great. Thansk for the tip.

@rumtscho "1/3 of g"?

rumtscho

Also, if you are accustomed to bad yeast cakes, your regional recipes may be include too much yeast in general.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Yes, maybe, but it too much yeast harmful? What is the effect?

rumtscho

Yes, if your original recipe calls for 9 g of yeast per 1000 g flour, you can use 3 g of dry yeast instead.

Yes, too much yeast is harmful.

Your dough rises too quickly

It doesn't get the time to produce the good flavors

and the overpopulated dough gets full of unpleasant, sharp flavors, mostly thiogroups and acetic acid.

Also, your dough can overproof too quickly. Then the yeast is spent before it goes into the oven, and the dough can't support itself. It deflates in the oven instead of rising.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho sheesh. sounds tricky.

rumtscho

2:55 PM

It is even more dangerous if you are living in a hot climate and your kitchen isn't climatized. Normal dough rising times are calculated for 22 Celsius rooms, not 32 Celsius.

@FaheemMitha Yes, yeast dough is quite complicated.

But also lots of fun when you get it right. And tasty.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Well, it's not me doing the cooking. :-)

rumtscho

And most people are quite OK with homemade breads and pizzas at which a pro baker will turn up their nose.

@FaheemMitha why not? Try it out, it's pleasant.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Cooking? Or yeast dough?

Actually, the stuff you get in India is terrible.

rumtscho

@FaheemMitha both cooking and baking yeast breads.

@FaheemMitha all "stuff"? Or just pizza?

Faheem Mitha

Probably a by-product of the fact that nobody in modern idea cares about anything but making as much money as possible as far as possible.

rumtscho

2:58 PM

India is internationally known for good food traditions :)

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Food, in this case. And specifically bread.

rumtscho

@FaheemMitha Yes, I know the problem.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Traditions, yes. Not the same as the 21st century reality.

It seems impossible to get good bread here.

Though I've not tried personally.

Indian food traditions are just fine. But I suspect these days they are practiced mostly in private homes in India. And presumably outside India.

rumtscho

@FaheemMitha This is sad. But bread is cheap and easy to make if you are willing to invest the time to learn how to do it well. I can highly recommend books like The Bread Baker's Apprentice if you want to get deep into it. Or try The Fresh Loaf, an online forum specifying only in bread. But most of the topics there might be rather advanced if you haven't worked with dough yet.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Anyway, thanks very much for the informative discussion.

@rumtscho Ok. I wonder if a bread maker is worth it. I think you can get these here.

rumtscho

3:02 PM

I don't care for bread makers. They save you time, but the quality is worse than bread made by hand.

Faheem Mitha

BTW, do many people on the site cook professaionlly? Or are they mostly hobbyists?

@rumtscho That makes sense. Presumably just labor-saving devices.

rumtscho

If you want to bake bread everyday, it can be worth it. Or want bread which is not the best you can have, but better than the store, and have no time or inclination to learn baking by hand.

@FaheemMitha Almost all are hobbyists. We tend to answer the concepts behind cooking, while professional cooking is all about executing known procedures with the highest speed.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho So you're cookery researchers? :-)

rumtscho

There are a few chefs interested in recipe creation and tweaking, but until they make it high enough in the hierarchy to such a position, they know more than what the site can offer, and are too busy for Internet anyway.

Faheem Mitha

Maybe you should all be on chemistry.sx. :-)

rumtscho

3:05 PM

@FaheemMitha Hobbyist cookery researchers, yes. The correct term is "food scientist", but I don't think we have a professional one here.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Oh, there are such people?

rumtscho

@FaheemMitha It is not exactly pure chemistry, it is a very applied subset of it.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Not sure what "they know more than what the site can offer" means.

rumtscho

@FaheemMitha Yes. Outside of academia, they are mostly employed in industrial food production - by concerns like Kraft, not in restaurants. A few are teachers and/or write books.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho I see. Any examples?

You don't mean someone like Julia Child, I suppose?

rumtscho

3:07 PM

@FaheemMitha They know more about creating food than we on the site do, so they don't come to ask us questions. And they are too busy to write answers.

@FaheemMitha She isn't a food scientist, just a famous cook personality.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho I see. Would a professional chef know a lot about the concepts behind cookery too?

rumtscho

topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/…

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Ok

@rumtscho Thanks.

rumtscho

@FaheemMitha No, most of them don't. Just like a writer doesn't really know that much about the concepts of how paper is made, or how a word processor software is built.

As for your original question, here are links to some older questions - if you had asked on main, we'd probably have closed it as a duplicate of one of them

22

Q: Why use yeast instead of baking powder?

Both yeast and baking powder are used to gas-fill the pastry, make it expand and thus make it soft and fluffy. Using yeast is rather inconvenient - it can be dead already or if the yeast is submerged in too hot water it can die and also waiting for yeast to work to let it gas-fill the pastry bef...

37

Q: What is the difference between baking soda and baking powder?

And can I use one in place of the other in certain recipes?

substitutions please-remove-this-tag baking-soda baking-powder

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho That seems like the wrong analogy. Wouldn't a better one be a writer not knowing much about formal grammar?

rumtscho

3:10 PM

6

Q: How to convert a recipe calling for active dry yeast into rapid rise yeast?

I have a recipe for rolls where the first stage calls for 2 packages active dry yeast, 1 tbsp sugar, and 1/2 cup warm water to be mixed until the yeast is proofed, and then 1/4 cup cubed butter is added to the proofed yeast. Then all of that is added to half of the flour (2 cups) and 2 tsp salt ...

baking yeast bread

@FaheemMitha Maybe, I'm not sure.

Imagine a writer bringing words to paper.

He knows how to move the pen so words appear on the paper.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Thanks for the links. I figured it was too elementry, and probably answered already.

rumtscho

But he doesn't know about capilary action in the pen, or pigment suspension in the ink, or absorbency of paper. And doesn't have to.

I think most writers are good in grammar, they can at least tell an adverb from a noun :)

A cook can rarely tell you why you can make risen bread with wheat flour but not cornflour.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho well ok. Anyway, analogies are of limited usefulness. I just meant that writer are typically not grammarians. e.g. in SE terms, it's the difference between english.sx and writers.sx.

In the style of Fowler's English Usage etc. Fowler was a grammarian, not a writer as such, afaik.

rumtscho

@FaheemMitha yes, maybe your analogy is better of mine. Hard to find a good measure.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Really? That seems pretty ignorant of them, if true. Doesn't knowing such things make you a better cook?

Is @derobert around here much? I see he is idling here.

rumtscho

3:18 PM

@FaheemMitha It depends on what you do as a cook. If you are a line cook, it doesn't matter to you at all. The job of a line cook is to execute a recipe perfectly, not tweak it. And he works under enormous time pressure. It is a job which requires perfect organisation, but has no need for creativity or tweaking.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho I see. Sounds like a job I'd hate.

rumtscho

@FaheemMitha He used to come more often, but lately he only enters once every few days, I think.

Faheem Mitha

Not familiar with the term line cook.

I've heard cooks get paid quite badly, even in the West.

rumtscho

A line cook is a cook in a restaurant specialized in a kind of food

So there is one cook who makes steaks, another one who makes fries, etc.

Small restaurants have one cook for everything, but there is more separation of labor in larger restaurants.

And yes, cooks are paid badly and work bad hours. Especially in the USA.

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho That's too bad.

@rumtscho Right, I see. Sounds like a horrid job.

@rumtscho per this wikipedia article

Baker's yeast

Baker's yeast is the common name for the strains of yeast commonly used as a leavening agent in baking bread and bakery products, where it converts the fermentable sugars present in the dough into carbon dioxide and ethanol. Baker's yeast is of the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is the same species (but a different strain) commonly used in alcoholic fermentation, which is called brewer's yeast. Baker's yeast is also a single-cell microorganism found on and around the human body. The use of steamed or boiled potatoes, water from potato boiling, or sugar in a bread dough provides food for...

Is your suggestion "active dry yeast"?

Helpful link - purplefoodie.com/baking-in-bombay

He writes:

"I use instant yeast for baking bread. It comes in a 500g vacuum sealed pack. It’s a lot better than the crappy active dry yeast (NEVER use this, it smells so foul) and has a much longer shelf life than fresh yeast (which you can get from your local baker)."

He also mentions a few places to get it.

rumtscho

3:34 PM

I am not sure what the exact English terms are

There used to be a type of dry yeast which is more active than the one usually sold nowadays in the supermarket

It actually has somewhat "stronger" action

But most home customers use it wrongly

they proof it (dissolve it in liquid first), just like other types of yeast

and then it fails

Faheem Mitha

@rumtscho Why is that wrong?

rumtscho