Delicious Bread Thanks to Cellular Respiration!

For our recipe we chose to use the following ingredients:

• 1.5 cups flour

• 1.5 tsp sugar

• 1 tsp salt

• 2 tsp olive oil

• 0.5 cups of warm water (120 degrees fahrenheit to 130 degrees fahrenheit)

• 1.125 tsp yeast

One of the processes involved in baking bread is cellular respiration, the equation for cellular respiration is below:

C6H12O6+O2=CO2+H2O+ATP

Cellular respiration occurs in the mitochondria of the yeast. When making bread cellular respiration helps the bread rise by creating CO2 through aerobic respiration. Once all of the oxygen is gone the bread undergoes anaerobic respiration which creates ethanol. The ethanol evaporate while the bread is being baked. Plants are involved in this process because of the wheat in the bread.

Yeast, like humans, undergoes both aerobic and anaerobic respiration, as mentioned above. However, during the anaerobic respiration process, humans undergo lactic acid fermentation while yeast undergoes alcoholic respiration. When bread undergoes respiration it begins to rise.

Bread is part of the carbon cycle because one of the key ingredients in bread is yeast and the yeast goes through cellular respiration. Carbon dioxide is one of the products in cellular respiration which shows that wheat releases carbon dioxide to contribute to the carbon cycle.

We chose to make our bread this way because we researched many different recipes but we ended up taking Mrs. Mallard’s base recipe and adjusting additional ingredients to the given recipe.

Our recipe turned out to be successful. The bread turned out to be very soft and we added the right amounts of each ingredient to successfully conduct the lab. We researched many different ways to prepare our bread but in the end we adjusted our proportion sizes to the base recipe Mrs. Mallard supplied. In the future perhaps we might try to add some other flavors into our bread.