The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Yeast/Flour Ratio

Diceman's picture
Diceman

Yeast/Flour Ratio

Hi All

Hmmm, have been pondering on this for some time and would appreciate any comments.

Say a recipe calls for 500g flour, 40g butter, 30g yeast, 10g salt and 350ml water for one loaf.  I would like to make two loaves so it would make sense to double all quantities of ingredients.  But................ I seem to recall that whilst you should double all ingredients, the same rule doesn't apply to the amount of yeast.  Despite frantic searching of my books, I cant find the answer.  Guess I could just experiment but thought some of you may have an opinion?

Thanks

 

Ford's picture
Ford

Double everything.  I see no reason to not double everything.

Ford

alfanso's picture
alfanso

on doubling the yeast, as Ford states.  And that goes double for me...

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

just use a 1 g or 2 g of yeast  of yeast and make a polish overnight on the counter using 75 g g of flour and water (deduct these amounts from the flour and water added later.  This should give you a much more flavorful bread in the end.

happy baking

PS that would be 150 g of flour and water total for two loaves and 2-4 g of yeast.

Postal Grunt's picture
Postal Grunt

A lot of recipes for dry yeast  in breads call for using 1% of the flour weight in determining the weight. A little bit of manipulating my old calculator shows that you'd use 5 g of instant dry yeast on a single loaf. If you're using fresh yeast, you might consider using 15 g or so for that same loaf. The butter might slow down some of the action from our friendly yeast beasts but time can always be the friend of flavor.

Diceman's picture
Diceman

Great!  Thanks for all your observations :-)

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

even fresh yeast is rather high for 500g of flour.  5 to 7g of instant or 15 to 20g  of fresh yeast is more than plenty for one loaf.  

To double, I'm with the rest, simply double the yeast of the recipe  but I think your recipe yeast is already doubled.  :)

Maverick's picture
Maverick

I know what you are referring to with not scaling the yeast. If you are making a lot of dough then scaling the yeast might be a problem. Simply doubling the recipe I would say to double the yeast unless you want it to take longer. Here is an explanation I gave over 6 years ago (surprisingly I still remember posting it ... how time flies):

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/66311#comment-66311

The link at the bottom of the thread no longer exists, but I might be able to hunt down the new link for it. Anyway, the important parts are mentioned in my two posts from back then.