Yes, You Can Bake Bread With Brewer’s Yeast | October

Photo: Courtesy of White Labs Kitchen & Tap

Note: This story was originally published in October.

A few years ago, I developed a hard-core focaccia baking habit and bought a two-pound bag of active dry yeast. Two pounds is so much yeast, especially when you’re using a couple scant teaspoons weekly.

I stored the single-celled fungi in my freezer, causing the occasional marital squabble. “What are you going to do with all that yeast?” my wife would ask, looking for space to store our daughter’s fish sticks.

“Bake a bunch of bread,” I’d reply.

I had company aplenty when the novel coronavirus hit. A newly formed army of homebound bakers ransacked grocery stores for flour and yeast, leaving shelves bare.

Multiple friends lamented the lack of yeast, fruitlessly hunting for a microbial fix to make pizza dough.

Suddenly, I was the guy with a big supply. Like an alternate-world cocaine dealer, I began doling out tiny sandwich baggies of yeast, the brown grains suddenly more valuable than the white stuff. I didn’t make much dough, but my friends sure did.

As amateur bread makers contend with a baking-yeast shortage, breweries nationwide are responding to the coronavirus-inspired surge by offering yeast and dough.

Jack’s Abby Craft Lagers started selling pizza dough and instant dry yeast out of its taproom in Framingham, Massachusetts, while California’s Long Beach Beer Lab offers dry yeast, pizza dough and its sourdough starter for pick-up. In early April, Nashville’s Yazoo Brewing responded to the yeast shortage by offering vials of wild bread culture, suited for making sourdough-style bread, to customers for pick-up or local delivery.

The brewery sold its first run of 15 vials in a few hours, while the next batch of 50 disappeared in less than 15 minutes. “We’ve had people message us from South America and other countries asking about this culture,” says Brandon Jones, the blender and brewer.

Over several years, he cultivated the culture teeming with yeast sourced from various locations, including a San Francisco bakery and the brewery’s spontaneous fermentations in Nashville. “I’ve got the tartness to where I like it,” Jones says. “It bakes pretty good bread, pizza crust, pretzels and everything else.”

Brewing microbes are a mighty good solution when you can’t find a single yellow packet of Fleischmann’s yeast. “It’s funny to see how the market trended,” says Eymard Freire, the recruitment and product manager for Siebel Institute of Technology, a brewing school in Chicago. “Stores ran out of baker’s yeast, but if you go to any homebrew store you can find brewer’s yeast. You can bake bread at home with it.”

Freire helped organize a February event at Siebel that examined the intersection of bread and beer. It featured a loaf fermented with a Bavarian wheat beer strain from Lallemand, which owns Siebel and is a global supplier of brewing, baking, and winemaking yeast and bacteria.

“Just thinking about it, I can taste it right now,” he says. “The crust was very thin and roasty. It was a very bready bread.”

Brewing yeast is not a simple recipe swap for baking yeast. The latter is super-active from the start, delivering a fast, dependable rise measured in hours. “That’s what is most important for the baker,” Freire says. On the other hand, brewers are looking for flavor development, a process that takes days, weeks or even years.

“Sometimes the brewing yeast is not as active as a baker would want. A yeast’s activity will highly impact your proofing time, or the rise of the bread.”

If you’re baking with dry brewing yeast, Freire recommends making a small 500 milliliter starter (around 16 ounces) with an easy-to-digest carbohydrate, such as simple syrup. Add the yeast, loosely cover it and wait 24 to 48 to hours to crank up cellular activity and cell count.

Fermentation can also take longer. White Labs Kitchen & Tap, in Asheville, North Carolina, favors a 72-hour fermentation for its wood-fired pizzas that are made with brewing yeast. (The restaurant is owned by yeast supplier White Labs.) “We’re looking for yeast that will be more active at higher temperatures and stable at lower temperatures as well,” says head chef Skyler Sabin, who currently favors a heat-tolerant strain of Norwegian kveik yeast.

Kveik’s lengthy fermentation creates pizzas with “a crunchier crust,” Sabin says. “They come out a little bit softer and a little bit sourer.” He also likes using White Labs’ Bavarian weizen yeast, which offers a lightly sweeter profile and subtle hints of the yeast’s signature flavors of cloves and bananas.

“One of the things that was surprising to us is how much of the beer characteristic comes out in the bread,” says Pete Ternes, a founder of Bungalow by Middle Brow.

The Chicago brewery, bakery and pizzeria—it also sells dough to go—regularly explores the synergies between baking and beer making, fermenting beers with sourdough-starter isolates, as well as fermenting dough with brewing yeast. “If you have a strain that’s really acidic and fruity, you’ll get that same acidic fruitiness in the bread.”

Yazoo’s Jones likes the caramel-toffee flavor that his culture delivers, plus the more pronounced sourness and acidity. “The character seems fuller all the way through,” he says.

Because of increased demand for his wild bread culture, he’s working to dehydrate it so he can ship it nationwide to bakers and collectors. Yes, collectors. “There is this whole subset of sourdough collectors that simply want to acquire your culture, dry it out and put it in a jar,” Jones says. “They are trying to collect all these rare blends of sourdough yeast. It’s very much a beer-aficionado thing.”