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What’s the yeast doing inside my bread?

Yeast: the tiny organism with massive potential

If you’re one of the millions of people who used lockdown to try something new like baking sourdough bread, you may well be wondering what’s happening chemically inside your loaf, especially if the end result keeps changing. Well, you’re not alone. Listeners Soheil and Sean are both keen bakers but want to know more about the thing that makes bread rise: yeast. What is yeast? Where does it come from and can you catch it? And how hard is it to ‘make’ yourself? Soon after lockdown took effect, commercial supplies of the stuff disappeared from supermarket shelves across the globe.

The shortage also affected brewers the world over. A big fan of yeast in most of its forms, Marnie Chesterton took on the challenge of creating her own. She talks to the brewers who hunt rare strains to create the perfect beer, and hears from the biologist who says these amazing microbes, used for thousands of years, could be used to make food production more sustainable. And she discovers how this simple ingredient could be instrumental in the fight against climate change.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton and Produced by Marijke Peters for the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú World Service.

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33 minutes

Last on

Mon 24 Aug 2020 12:32GMT

Broadcasts

  • Fri 21 Aug 2020 19:32GMT
  • Mon 24 Aug 2020 03:32GMT
  • Mon 24 Aug 2020 08:32GMT
  • Mon 24 Aug 2020 12:32GMT

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