FAQ for alt.bread.recipes

Leavenings

Editor's note: Just throwing in some Roy Basan thoughts here, to be edited into a more thorough essay. These are currently undedited.

Leavening in bread can also include biological leavening , which is confered by the bakers yeast and the organism in the starter culture for sourdough, the additional chemical leavening added, in some products in form of baking powder in donuts and sweet dough to enhance the lift and oven spring of the these products.

Yeas unable to digest the starch in the flour unless the flour contains alpha amylase. The yeast only had the beta amylase which acts on the dextrin that was being acted by the alpha amylase from the damaged starch present in the flour. Even if supposing there is an alpha amylase present in the yeast it will not react with the intact starch granule.