How to make a little yeast go a long way when baking bread (2024)

If you haven’t been able to find yeast from your typical sources, inquire with your local bakery. Many are selling it, and so are restaurants, including some not necessarily known for bread. Even one of my favorite farmers market vendors has been offering limited amounts. When you do happen to land some yeast, it may feel like you’ve won the lottery. You may want to preserve the precious supply.

The good news is you don’t necessarily need to hunt for recipes that use very small amounts. If you have a recipe, make it — just use less yeast. “If you don’t have a lot of yeast, you’re simply adding time,” says cookbook author and bakery owner Daniel Leader, whose most recent book written with Lauren Chattman, “Living Bread,” was recently nominated for a James Beard award.

Here are some tips from Leader to help you stretch your yeast supply.

Start thinking like a baker.Talk to any professional about making bread and you’ll probably start to hear about baker’s percentages. These are formulas for how chefs think about their ingredients in relation to each other, typically with regard to weight. As King Arthur Flour explains, “In using baker’s percentage, each ingredient in a formula is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight, and the flour weight is always expressed as 100 percent.” Leader says that as a general rule, a typical recipe that calls for around 500 grams of flour will use 1 percent, or 5 grams, of fresh yeast, or about half as much (2 1/2 grams, or between 3/4 and 1 teaspoon) dried yeast. Leader says you don’t want to go down to such an infinitesimal amount to be insignificant, but as little as 1/4 teaspoon of dry yeast, in the above example, is fine. In “Living Bread,” he says he even goes down to as little as 1 gram, or 0.1 percent, not even 1/4 teaspoon, for a loaf with 500 grams of flour.

If you’ve ever made any variation of Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread, you already have experience in using small amounts of yeast. This No-Knead Whole-Wheat Breadrecipe I published uses just 1/2 teaspoon of yeast for 400 grams of flour. The dough rises 12 to 18 hours on the counter in a bowl and then an additional 1 to 2 hours once shaped.

Prepare to wait.Leader says that many home baking books are aimed to help cooks achieve more immediate gratification. More yeast will move things along faster. When there’s less of it, you just need to wait longer to allow the same amount of work to happen. What exactly is happening? As Chattman describes in “The Baking Answer Book,” the yeast and bacteria consume sugars to create carbon dioxide, alcohol and acids. When the carbon dioxide gets trapped in the web of gluten (itself a byproduct of water mixing with proteins in the flour), the dough rises. There’s no hard and fast rule about how much longer your dough will need to rise when you use less yeast. It could be twice as long, or even longer. Leader says waiting for the dough to double in size is “an old-fashioned metric,” and is not always the desired outcome, especially with wet and sticky doughs. So pay attention to the cues described in the recipe with regard to size and how the dough may feel when touched, keeping in mind your rise may not be quite as robust when using less yeast than the recipe calls for.

Give the yeast a head start.Leader says another way to go is to make a sponge with whatever yeast you’re using, along with a portion of the flour and water. He suggests using 1/3 of both the flour and water from the recipe. Use warm water, and let the sponge rest at least a few hours, or even overnight, on the counter. Then proceed with the recipe, adding the rest of the ingredients.

Boost the yeast with sourdough.If you have taken the plunge into sourdough and your starter is not fully mature, you can still use it to supplement a limited amount of yeast. Leader says your starter should be at least four days old. He gives an example in which you may have created a starter with 100 grams each of flour and water. When you cast half of the starter off to feed it, you can combine the discard with yeast to bake bread. With a bread in the 350- to 500-gram flour range, you can incorporate that 100 grams of starter, reducing the water by 25 or 30 grams and cutting the yeast by 50 to 75 percent. It may take some trial and error depending on the recipe and the age of the starter. “If the bread is rising slower than usual, don’t worry about it,” Leader says.

Think about temperature.When using less yeast, warm water can help sustain and nudge it along, even if the recipe originally called for cool water. He suggests water that is around 85 degrees. Leader cautions against low-yeast doughs going into the refrigerator, as the cool temperatures can slow the yeast too much. If you are really set on a fridge rise, give the dough at least a few hours on the counter. But an overnight rise on the counter for most such doughs is fine. If you’ve gone with less than 1 gram of yeast per 500 grams of flour, you may want to consider something a bit cozier than room temp — for example, a warm spot above an oven or dishwasher, or a microwave or turned-off oven with a bowl of hot water.

Expect some differences.Leader says breads made with less yeast develop a “bubblier” crumb. That doesn’t mean you’ll see bigger holes. Instead, it will be more of a honeycomb texture that is “consistently inconsistent,” with some big and some small holes. He compares it to what you might find when you slice open a good baguette. Another bonus: Slowly risen breads will not stale as quickly, Leader says.

Your longer-risen dough will not taste the same either — a good thing for many people. Leader says you should think about bread as you do other fermented foods, such as yogurt and cider.“The slow fermentation, you’re getting more flavor development,” he says, explaining that you may notice the bread tastes nuttier and earthier, more like the flour and less like the “gassy” yeast. “You’re going to feel the time when you taste the bread.”