Garry Peel, age 11 Mount Pleasant, Utah :
How does yeast work?
It takes about five thousand little yeasts to measure one inch. Imagines These tiny one‑celled plants toil away to make our daily bread light and spongy. Not that they feel put upon, They love their work. For all they have to do for us is to eat and breathe, Naturally, this makes them grow, Being one‑celled plants they cannot grow above a certain size. When everything is right this takes one hour, Then a yeast puts forth a bud and grows a daughter cell. To set them to work for us, we give them plenty of their favorite food and put them in the right temperature, They eat away breathe and multiply at a great rate. .
There are countless different yeasts that share our world. They teem in the soil, ride the breezes and cluster on ripe fruit. There may be 300 thousand of them on the surface of one ripe grape. Some varieties are shaped like sausages most are chubby ovals and a few are round balls. All of them are classed in the fungi plant family. This makes them cousins of the mushroom and the roly‑poly puff ball.
A few of these teeming yeasts have been tamed to work for us. These are the ones whose eating habits can process or improve our foods The favorite food of yeasts is sugar and our tame yeasts can find it in the most unlikely food stuffs. The bread‑making yeasts digest sugar from flour. When things are just right, a yeast cell eats its own weight in food every two hours, This amazing appetite is never satisfied, Meal time is every hour day and night.
The yeast’s digestive process changes sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide gas, about half of each. Certain tame yeasts are employed to make only alcohol. The tiny mites on that grape can turn the fruit into wine. The carbon dioxide gas goes off as waste,
Other yeasts are employed to make carbon dioxide, Among these are our little bread makers. In this process, the alcohol they make evaporates off into the air as waste. The carbon dioxide gas is put to use,
The baker uses a gob of purified yeasts all of one kind. He kneads them into the flat flour and water dough and puts this mixture to rest in a warm place. Things are fine for the yeasts and they start to dine at once4 As this is digested, they give off the gas and surround themselves with little bubbles. The little pockets of gas cannot escape through the sticky dough. So they push it up. The dough rises, all spongy with countless little pockets of gas.
At the right time, the baker shapes his loaves and puts them into a hot oven. The heat dries out the moisture from the dough and sets it around the spongy bubbles. But this heat is too much for the little yeasts. Their bread‑making work is done and they are baked with the loaves. We eat them in the bread and give them a new job. Yeasts are rich in proteins, carbohydrates and vitamins. Now it is our turn to digest. Our bodies turn their valuable food stuffs into bones, muscle and energy,