Pictured is a biga with 879g of flour and .8g of yeast. If I had a before picture, you would be able to see this tripled in size overnight. 

I mention this becuase I see a lot of people post their recipes with a TON of yeast. Entire packets sometimes. I want to encourage you to use only as much yeast as required and no more. This is how you get real flavor out of your dough. Your yeast needs to work for it a bit. 

When you use a massive amount of yeast, the yeast are essentially the people from Wall-e. If you just sit around and eat all day, you’ll still eat, but you won’t produce the other things that make life interesting. You won’t improve your environment. 

Yeast is the same. The main thing yeast produces are co2 and alcohol, but yeast produces a lot of other compounds and it puts a lot of other stuff into your dough. This is even more apparent in brewing, where a one degree change in fermentation can completely change the flavor of the beer. 

Now, bread isn’t a dramatic as beer. A simple change of one degree in fermentation isn’t going to give you a dramatically different bread, but at the end of the day this is the same yeast brewers are using, it’s extremely variable in what it produces and how it behaves. 

So, for anyone using a large dosage of yeast, I’d like to encourage you to dial it back, and make the yeast work a little harder. 

Here are some examples of how much yeast I’ve been using. 

Bar pies - 500g flour and .6g yeast  
NY/ Detroit/Sicilian - 879g of flour and 1.8g yeast   
Chicago tavern - 500g of flour and .8g yeast. 

None of these recipes struggle with rise or oven spring. 

Happy baking!

Let’s talk yeast dosages