 Nothing beats yeast. Hi, I'm Chef Nini Nguyen, and today we're gonna talk about yeast, or yeast substitutes. So here I have three different loaves of bread. This one is made with yeast. Now these two are made with leaveners. Leaveners are chemical compounds that help things rise. Baking soda and baking powder. So yeast is a single cell fungi that loves sugar. It likes to eat it and it helps it grow. Now there are three different types of yeast that are very common at the market. We have active dry, which is pretty much the traditional yeast that you kind of find everywhere. We have instant yeast, which is a quick acting yeast that does not need to be dissolved into water to work. And then we have fresh yeast, or otherwise called cake yeast. And you always wanna kinda crumble it up a little bit before you put it in your recipe so that you know that the yeast kinda spreads out. So I'm gonna show you how to bloom yeast. Now you wanna feed your yeast sugar and you wanna use tepid water. Around 110 degrees, but honestly, you wanna put your finger in. It should not feel hot. It should feel almost like bath water. And in just a few minutes, you'll see bubbles form on the side of your bowl and that's how you know your yeast is alive. So now that we know what yeast is, let's talk about some substitutions. When you're in a pinch, you can definitely use baking soda with lemon juice. Baking soda is a base and when you mix it with something like lemon juice, it really foams. And this is what you want to happen in your bread. So I have my dough here. It's kneaded, the gluten's developed, and you want this to happen before you add your chemical leaveners because once you activate your chemical leavener, it's gonna start foaming and it's going to create the bubbles that you want that's gonna be in your bread. So you wanna shape it and bake it right away. But you can see this dough is nice and stretchy. And now I'm gonna add some baking soda to my lemon juice and you wanna add equal portions. So half lemon juice, half baking soda for whatever the equivalent of the yeast is to your recipe. So I'm gonna add that, mix that up and you see all of those bubbles are starting to form. And we wanna just put all of that, make sure it's nice and mixed up right into our dough. And we wanna knead this and just mix it just so that it is fully incorporated into our dough. So once you add it all to your dough, you wanna now shape your dough and bake it. So if you don't have lemon juice, you can substitute for any other acid. You can use vinegar, you can use buttermilk or you can use a combination of milk and vinegar. Now I wanna test out our loaf. We're gonna open it up. And here you can see there are little air pockets. Now let's taste it. I'm just gonna break myself a little piece. I'm really interested in the crumb itself inside. That doesn't taste so bad. It's a lot more dense than normal bread. But this reminds me very much of a quick bread, like Irish soda bread. In a pinch, this would work. So another substitute we can use is baking powder. I have another dough that I've needed just like the recipe calls for it. And just like our baking soda, we are gonna cook this immediately after we add our baking powder. It's better if you have double acting baking powder because it releases the carbon dioxide twice. Once when you add it to the dough and then again when you bake it. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna incorporate my baking powder right into this dough. So you wanna sprinkle it a little bit. You might wanna work in a couple of batches. So I'm gonna kinda dust the dough kind of like you would flour and knead it in. So you're incorporating that baking powder in and the moisture from the dough is going to activate your baking powder for that first go round. Just take your time and knead it and let it get into that dough. So here I have my baking powder loaf. It feels dense kind of like the baking soda. But if you could see the color is different. Let's see how it looks like inside. I'm just gonna crack this open. You can see right off the bat that the baking powder loaf is fatter. It's rounder, but I think that it rose a little bit better than the baking soda lemon juice. Now let's see how it tastes. It's dense just like the baking soda, but it's still work. If you are making say a crostini, you could really use this. So now that we've tried our two substitutes let's see how it holds up to the yeast bread. I'm gonna cut so that we could really compare each one. You could see the yeast one is a lot bigger. It's not cracked. It's brown and the bubbles are more active. So, you know, here you have a tighter crumb and a crumb is basically just a cross sections, the bubbles that actually happen inside your bread. Now I'm gonna try this alone. It's more tender. It has a nice crumb. It tears very easily. It's fluffy. Nothing is better than fresh bread, butter and a little bit of flake salt. Nothing beats yeast, but these are helpful in a pinch.