Flour and yeast shortages have hit stores all over the country, and books like Forkish’s have become hot sellers. We’re baking a lot of bread in the middle of this pandemic. The air itself seems poised between life and death. There are other things in the air, on the surfaces I touch, on the packages I get delivered, and on the skin of those I come in contact with. It’s literally alive, feeding and growing and making things delicious.Īnd yet as I put on a mask to head outside for my weekly trip to the grocery store, it’s hard to remember that yeast is all around us.

And because we’re humans, and because humans eat a lot of bread, that might make you think of sustenance, of wholeness, of life. It’s not necessary to have yeast to make good bread, but just hearing the word probably makes you think of a warm loaf, fresh out of the oven. In his essential 2012 text, Flour Water Salt Yeast (a book I bought in late March when I realized baking was going to be a thing I did a lot of going forward), Ken Forkish writes, “I often prefer to add small amounts of commercial yeast to my levain bread doughs to get the best of both worlds: bread that has wine-like complexity and acidity as well as a light texture in the crumb.” Despite what you may have heard from sourdough starter partisans, neither method is necessarily better than the other. In contrast, the yeast you can buy on store shelves is a dried-out version of one naturally occurring fungus that is specifically cultivated to provide faster rises in bread dough. If you’ve seen the sourdough starters that have bubbled and risen throughout social media feeds, you’re seeing natural yeast at work, gnawing on water and flour and giving off carbon dioxide that causes that mixture to grow. In its naturally occurring form, yeast is a single-celled fungus that pops up everywhere.

Somehow, we coaxed an invisible creature out of the world around us and into our food. You can also buy it in the supermarket (sometimes).īut the road from “all around you, all the time” to supermarket shelves encompasses most of human history. It’s on the packages you get delivered and on the skin of those you come in contact with. It’s on the surfaces you touch every day.

Ken forkish bread