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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

Yeast. I haven’t needed yeast in years, recently I found a recipe with yeast I wanted to try and found out that, at least where I am in Germany, yeast is sold out.

I heard about the webcam thing from my boss, he asked me if he gave me a webcam years ago when I started remote working. He did, but it was in the attic and I had to go looking for it ;)

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Yup, same here in Canada - can't get yeast anywhere. Even flour is tough to come by despite the fact that Canada has tons of wheat - the flour mills are working overtime.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/article-f...

You can get flour from centralmilling.com

You can make your own yeast: https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/31/21199708/yeast-diy-baking...

Yeah, I know. But it doesn’t seem worth it to buy a kg of flour just to make yeast for a single recipe ;)

Also in germany, you don't need 1kg, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n9yh5lDvts

I did this last weekend and made a pretty good loaf (my first time).

So the thing is, the recipe is for a nut-flour based pizza dough. I’m not sure if a sour dough starter works for that. And as I never made the recipe before, I wouldn’t even know if any problem is because of the recipe or some problem with the starter.

Fair enough, I would still just try anyway as that's the only way you'll know for sure. The yeast is pretty forgiving, all it does is eat sugars in the flour and convert into CO2.

Google "yeast water" for an alternative

Especially considering how flour is becoming rare as well, at least in Italy and France

This one worked quite reliably for me with about 180g of flour. https://www.hefe-und-mehr.de/en/2015/05/brotbacken-fr-anfnge...

You can always ask around in your friendly neighborhood forum for a starter culture, there's a lot of people that are willing to share.

If you have bakers yeast, you can just feed it and multiply the amount trivially: Half a cube (20g) or 7g dry yeast, mix with 15g sugar, 100g flour, 100g water, let rise for an hour or two in a warm place. Fill in icecube form, freeze. Each cube is about half as strong as a "regular" cube, so you may need to experiment a little with rising time for your dough.

You can do this and wait for days and pray you have not created some nasty poisonous culture. Or you can use human gut microbes to generate instant safe yeast.

“Human gut microbes” is a very broad category that also includes e-coli.

Sourdough starter isn't some nasty poisonous culture lol. It's perfectly safe and every grocery store and bakery have huge tubs of it. If you're really concerned just go to your grocery store bakery, ask for some starter, and feed it.

Never even heard of "sourdough starter". I use them small dry-yeast packets from Lidl. The point is that human shit and saliva are the surest way start right kind of fermentation of moonshine and hooch if approved products are not available. E-coli and other critters die anyways in the anaerobic process or in the oven.

BTW. My "local bakery" is probably in Estonia. In another country that is. Wider Helsinki area is under lockdown and yeast may not be approved essential.

You can create your own sourdough just from wheat and water. Takes a few days till you have the first real dough, but from that on, you can keep the sourdough alive. There are plenty of YouTube videos about creating/using sourdough. With sourdough you make the best breads and don't need any yeast. (sourdough itself contains yeast)

Starters from wild yeast has been how bread was made for thousands of years prior to the introduction of commercial yeast relatively recently. (And, of course, sourdough starters are still used to make sourdough bread.)

Yeah but you’re not a true artisan bread maker unless your starter descended from the first bread makers in ancient Mesopotamia.

Realistically your country isn't really known for having any good bread though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalakukko

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_bread

Yeast came back in stock at my local stores just as the flour ran out.

Don’t worry At least us Jews won’t be buying yeast or flour in the next 8 days :)

We had the same yeast problem and finally solved it by trying our local bakery, which happily sold yeast to us. Obvious in hindsight...

Your local bakery also will have cake yeast and instant yeast which is really good stuff that's annoyingly hard to find at grocery stores. Cake yeast I get because it's perishable but instant yeast has little excuse other than it has to be refrigerated after you open it.

They probably will also sell flour to you. At least here in Germany there seems to be the problem, that there isn't enough flour packaged in customer packages. Bakeries get their flour by huge sacks or even in silos, so there is no shortage of unpackaged flour.

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