The baker's plant

If it weren't for a plant called yeast, we would not have the kind of bread we eat.

Yeasts are plants that don't look like plants. They look like gelatin drops. And they are so small that they can only be seen through a microscope.. They float in the air. They do nothing until they alight in warm, humid places where their proper food is found.. Bread dough is precisely one of those places.

The bread dough is made by mixing flour and water until you get a warm and moist dough. Sugar is added to this, what is the favorite food of yeasts. So, when they settle in the bread dough, many things start to happen.

Here is what happens. When yeast takes food, swells up and splits into two new floors.

So, each new plant feeds, swells up and splits in two again.

In no time, There are millions of new yeast plants!

All these tiny plants eat sugar, and transform part of it into a gas. This gas causes a multitude of small bubbles to form in the bread dough.. So, the bread swells. When the bread is cooked, all the bubbles are united with air. So the bread is light. But without the yeasts that turn sugar into gas, the bread would not swell.

Formerly, people would place the bread dough in a warm place for the yeast to settle on. Nowadays, bakers don't wait for this to happen. Simply, they buy the yeast in packages and mix it with the bread dough.

Experiment with yeast

When yeast plants start to use sugar, the jar will be filled with foam.

Yeast plants create foam by transforming sugar into carbon dioxide gas..