April 2020 – Terra Manna Bread School

A friend called me this morning to ask a question about yeast. She is an experienced home baker, but, like many people, has always used Active Dry Yeast. Because so many people are baking while they are in lockdown, yeasts and flours are becoming hard to find. A mutual friend gave her some Instant Dry Yeast, but she wasn’t sure how to use it in place of the Active Dry yeast she it used to.

I thought (actually, my wife thought) other people might be in the same situation, so here’s a short explanation of some different kinds of yeasts you might have access to, and how to convert between them if you need to.

Instant Dry Yeast, up close and personal.

The main types of yeast that you are likely to run into are Active Dry Yeast, Instant Dry Yeast and Quick or Rapid Rise Yeast. Active Dry and Rapid Rise are the main kinds of yeast that you can purchase at the grocery store in the little packets that I always used to make a mess of when I tried to tear them apart.

The main difference between these is:

Active Dry Yeast is milled to a larger size than instant yeast. Therefore it needs to be dissolved in water before using. When I first learned to bake, long, long ago, this is what I used. Most home bakers proof the yeast before baking. Proofing is the process of dissolving the yeast in water with a little carbohydrate – usually sugar – dissolved in it, and then waiting until it bubbles to prove it’s alive.

Instant Dry Yeast is milled much more finely so that you can mix it directly into the flour and other dry ingredients, and then add the liquid ingredients and you’re good-to-go. There’s no need to proof it. I have read that instant yeast contains a higher percentage of live yeast than Active Dry. I’m not sure if this is true, but it certainly behaves as if it is. SAF Red instant dry yeast is the yeast that I use for almost everything, as does just about every professional baker I know.

Quick Rise or Rapid Rise Yeast are milled finely, like Instant Dry. They also have enzymes and other things added to turbo charge them with the idea of making your dough rise faster. As I understand it, you really can’t proof rapid rise yeast as this will make them much less effective.

Osmotolerant Yeast , the most common of which is SAF Gold, is specially designed to be more reliable when making breads with a high sugar content (more than 10% of the flour weight). I use it when making sweet challah, or croissants, or other sweet breads.

Which to use?

If you can, choose one you like and get to know it and use it for everything. If you’ve always used Active Dry yeast and know how it behaves, then there’s no reason not to continue using it. The yeast you know is almost always going to give you better results than the yeast you don’t know. When I’m using commercial yeast, I exclusively use SAF instant yeast.

Switching between Active Dry and Instant yeast
I like to keep things simple, so I use the same amount of yeast no matter which I use. If I were using Active Dry I would expect it to take a little more time to rise than if I’m using Instant. There are so many things, primarily temperature, that determine when your dough is done rising I wouldn’t put a number on it, but just be ready for it to take a little bit longer.

If, for some reason that I can’t think of, you want things to take the same amount of time, you can find conversion tables, but that seems like a lot of trouble.

Of course, if you can’t find any commercial yeast, you can make a sourdough starter, as our ancestors have done for generations. I’ll put up a post soon about how to make and use your own starter.

If you’re not done reading about commercial yeast, here’s a great article on the King Arthur Flour site about which yeast to use, where they show you their testing.

I hope this is helpful. Have a good bake!

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I love matzah. My wife loves matzah too. in fact even our Beagle Winston loves matzah.

Is that strange?

How much do we love it?

There is a custom not to eat matzah for a period before Passover – from 1 to 30 days – so that when you first eat it at the Passover seder it’s with extra joy and excitement. In the Rubinstein household, the month before Passover when we don’t eat matzah feels like the deprivation of something essential and life-giving. However, like winter in Pittsburgh (where I grew up and went to college), where the first spring day when it’s warm enough to go outside in a t-shirt is so glorious that it almost makes it worth the way-too-many months of winter spent indoors worth it, the first bite of matzah at seder after not eating matzah for a month is so delicious that it’s worth the month of deprivation.

Though I can’t imagine it, some people think matzah is something to endure once a year at Passover, and then block from their minds until faced with it again next year. They think of it as a flat, white square that tastes like cardboard and constipates you for days. Sure, you can grind it up and make it into matzah balls, and almost everyone likes matzah balls…that is unless the only ones they have had are the hard, dry, sit-in-your-stomach-for-days kind. (Yes, it’s true, some people like their matzah balls this way, but that’s something for them to take up in therapy).

In terms of cooked matzah, at lest traditionally, the highest form is Matzo Brei. The lowest, if you care about my opinion, are those soggy sponge cakes served at passover. (I’m sure your bubbie’s was great. No need to write.)

Did you know that not all matzah is white and square? Many people eat beautiful, hand-made, round, baked to a deep brown, shmura matzah. Other than being cracker-hard and dry, it shares few qualities with the square machine-made matzah that you are probably thinking about.

And here’s a shocker (to some people at least), it’s likely that the original matzah was probably not hard like a cracker, but was likely soft like a…well, like a middle eastern flatbread (which it is). In fact, there are still communities that eat soft matzah, and an increasing general acceptance that soft matzah is okay to eat at Passover.

I thought of writing about matzah during Passover, which just ended, but I never got around to it. Perhaps I was too busy eating matzah to write about it. As my beloved wife always says, you don’t want to spend more time talking about your relationship than you spend having it. The same thing is true of matzah, it seems: You shouldn’t spend more time writing about it than you spend eating it.

My hope this year was that I would finish building my new oven just in time to bake matzah in it for Passover, and that we would get to eat home baked matzah this year. (While not going into the Jewish law of matzah baking too much, I wouldn’t be able to use the oven that I used for baking bread throughout the year for making matzah for Passover). For many reasons, that didn’t happen. Truth be told, for other reasons of Jewish law that I won’t go into, I wasn’t sure that baking my own matzah was really that good of an idea anyway.

My Oven — My new, but unfinished oven where I was planning on baking my Passover matzah this year.

But now that passover is over, I can bake all of the matzah I want. So, I invite you to follow me down this strange journey into the land of matzah, where miracles happen, and battle lines are drawn, and the Metamucil flows freely.

The plan is to do three posts: The history of Matzah, recipes for baking matzah, and finally recipes for using matzah.

Buckle up!

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Month: April 2020

Yeast Swapping – Active Dry to Instant and back.

Matzah, my love