Today you need more than the traditional yeast to ensure you have the best possible outcomes when baking. Yeast is a complex of natural enzymes that may start, accelerate, and complete the fermentation process.
Many things are different from how we used to do them in the past. The industrial production of yeast in large quantities may be hard to achieve today. That’s why you need to have a list of the nutrients you can easily find at home that may replace yeast.
After reading the rest of the article, you will know the main ingredients you can use instead of yeast. They could help you with your recipes and ensure you will have the best possible outcome for the fermentation processes.
What Can Be Used as a Yeast Nutrient?
Peels of Citrus Fruits (Orange or Lemon)
When you have lots of citric fruits in your garden, it’s better to use their juice and never throw away the peels. Even though the peels have no nutritional value, you can use them to start and accelerate the fermentation process.
These peels, especially the ones coming from lemon, citrus, and orange, have lots of inside enzymes. The enzymes are there to get released when you wash them or boil them in hot water. That will allow you to start the fermentation process easier and without any issues.
Concentrated Lemon Juice
If you don’t have access to the peels, then there is no need to worry. Your next best solution would be concentrated lemon juice. You can have that for free when your lemon trees blossom in the spring. You can squeeze out of the lemons the favorite lemon juice and keep it in sterilized vials. Lemon juice has more enzymes than any other concentrated fruit juice.
You can use lemon juice to ensure that the fermentation process starts. The best way to do that would be to have some warm water close to the juice and mix it with it. Then adding the mixture to the recipe will give you a chance to ferment the ingredients much easier and faster than with any other ingredient.
Strong Black or Herbal Tea
Now we come to see another ingredient most people have on their kitchen countertops. Black tea and, in some cases, herbal tea is the best alternative to industrial yeast. You can choose the best black tea that comes in powder and not in sachets. That will allow you to add it to hot water and let it give its valuable nutrients to the mixture.
After you are done with it, you need to wait at least fifteen minutes for the temperature to go down. At this point, you have a mixture of black or herbal tea with activated enzymes that will allow you to ferment any substance you like. You may even add it to recipes where fermentation is necessary and look at the dramatic results you will have.
Smashed Raisins
People living close to the Mediterranean sea have a lot of raisin cultivations close to their homes. Raisins are not that rare in the EU and the Americas. You can start gathering raisins and keep them close to the sun exposure to let them dry. When they are scorched, you can start smashing them. By smashing them, you allow extracting their useful fermentation enzymes.
That extract will be useful to any possible recipe you may have and you need to accelerate or jump-start the fermentation process. But you need to be cautious with raisins and their extract. You may add a little of it to the recipes but keep it away from your dogs. It’s potentially harmful to them since some of these enzymes could ruin their respiratory balance and make them severely ill.
Grape Nuts
If you live in the United States, you have lots of raisin fields around you. These raisins are usually enough for wine production or direct consumption as fruits during the summer season. However, what people typically don’t know is that grape nuts are the best alternative you may have in your kitchen to industrial yeast.
Should you need to replace that yeast for your baking process, it’s better to start drying the grapes and ensure you smash them like the raisins before. Even their extract could be powerful enough to give you more enzymes than you need to start the fermentation process. Doing so with raisins will give a great taste to your recipes, so the better the raisin quality, the best the final outcome will be.
How Do You Make Yeast Nutrients at Home?
To make yeast nutrients at home, you need to have a peeler and a smasher. After you enter the fruits or peels in the peeler, you can smash them easily with the other device. These nutrients are easy to start the fermentation process provided you have them to the right temperature.
Most of the time, you need to have them in warm temperatures of about 90F to 105F, which will give you the best possible results when adding them to the mixtures.
What is the Best Way to Boost Your Yeast?
The best way to boost the yeast you have created would be to increase the population of the yeast cells that start the fermentation. You can do that at home and in vitro. First, you can set the optimal temperature close to 80F.
Then you can start adding the so-called yeast starters. These are simple solutions of maltose and dextrose that can be the initial nutrients for the yeast cells. Soon enough, you will have plenty of strains of yeast cells to ferment your recipe.
Final Words
Today you must have more options when you need to use yeast for your recipes at home. Now you know all the useful alternatives you can use at home, and you never knew they could work the same efficiently as normal yeast!
REFERENCES
- The Role of Yeast in the Fermentation process – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7466055/
- Yeast and Fermentation Process Video – https://study.com/learn/lesson/yeast-fermentation-process-use.html
- An Overview of Alcoholic Fermentation – https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/alcoholic-fermentation
- Popular Yeast Alternatives that Work – https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/yeast-substitute
