Baker's Yeast - History

History

It is not known when yeast was first used to bake bread; the earliest definite records come from Ancient Egypt. Researchers speculate that a mixture of flour meal and water was left longer than usual on a warm day and the yeasts that occur in natural contaminants of the flour caused it to ferment before baking. The resulting bread would have been lighter and tastier than the previous hard flatbreads. It is generally assumed that the earliest forms of leavening were likely very similar to modern sourdough; the leavening action of yeast would have been discovered from its action on flatbread doughs, and would either have been cultivated separately or transferred from batch to batch by means of previously mixed ("old") dough. Alternatively, the development of leavened bread seems to have developed in close proximity to the development of beer brewing, and barm from the beer fermentation process can also be used in bread making.

Without an understanding of microbiology, early bakers would have had little ability to directly control yeast cultures, but still kept locally interesting cultures by reusing doughs and starters to leaven later batches. However, it became possible to isolate and propagate favored yeast strains in the same manner as was done in the beer industry, and it eventually became practical to propagate yeast in a slurry with a composition similar to beer wort, usually including malted barley and wheat flour. Such cultures (sometimes referred to in old American cookery as "emptins", from their origins as the dregs of beer or cider fermentation) would become the ancestors of modern baker's yeast, as they generally were carefully maintained to avoid what would later be discovered to be bacterial contamination, including using preservatives such as hops as well as boiling the growth medium.

In the 19th century, bread bakers obtained their yeast from beer brewers, and this led to sweet-fermented breads such as the Imperial "Kaiser-Semmel" roll, which generally lacked the sourness created by the acidification typical of Lactobacillus. However, beer brewers slowly switched from top-fermenting to bottom-fermenting yeast (both S. cerevisiae) and this created a shortage of yeast for making bread, so the Vienna Process was developed in 1846. While the innovation is often popularly credited for using steam in baking ovens leading to a different crust characteristic, it notably included procedures for high milling of grains (see Vienna grits), cracking them incrementally instead of mashing them with one pass; as well as better processes for growing and harvesting top-fermenting yeasts, this was known as press-yeast.

Refinements in microbiology following the work of Louis Pasteur led to more advanced methods of culturing pure strains. In 1879, Great Britain introduced specialized growing vats for the production of S. cerevisiae, and in the United States around the turn of the century centrifuges were used for concentrating the yeast, making modern commercial yeast possible, and turning yeast production into a major industrial endeavor. The slurry yeast made by small bakers and grocery shops became cream yeast, a suspension of live yeast cells in growth medium, and then compressed yeast, the fresh cake yeast that became the standard leaven for bread bakers in much of the Westernized world during the early 20th century.

During World War II, Fleischmann's developed a granulated active dry yeast for the United States armed forces, which did not require refrigeration and had a longer shelf life and better temperature tolerance than fresh yeast; it is still the standard yeast for US military recipes. The company created yeast that would rise twice as fast, cutting down on baking time. Lesaffre would later create instant yeast in the 1970s, which has gained considerable use and market share at the expense of both fresh and dry yeast in their various applications.