Wednesday... What is Yeast?

On Wednesday we moved on to the second part of the parable....yeast.

Jesus said that a tiny bit of yeast can change a big lump of dough.  We saw part of that process over the next two days.

Science Activity:  Yeast makes carbon dioxide gas.  When yeast is mixed into dough, the gas bubbles get trapped in the sticky dough.  That's what makes bread fluffy.  In our experiment we discovered just how much carbon dioxide yeast makes!

Abishai gently shaking the yeast and water to wake the yeast from it's dormant "sleepy" state.

Yeast needs something to eat in order to reproduce.  After adding some sugar we placed a balloon over the bottle, secured it with a rubber band and then waited for the yeast to make gas and fill the balloon.

We came back every 10 minutes for 40 minutes to see if our balloon had grown bigger. 

Standing upright!

20 minutes: Starting to fill!

40 minutes

After 40 minutes of observations, I moved it to the counter to see if it would continue to expand over the course of the day.  This is what the balloon looked like mid afternoon.

Late afternoon: This is about the biggest the balloon got.  By the next morning the balloon started to sag a bit. 

THURSDAY

We did another cooking project, we made quick yeast bread.  This project wasn't as successful as the others, but we still had fun.

All of our supplies gathered together.

Measuring.

We ground up some fresh spelt flour!

Kneading.

Micaiah taking a turn.  He wasn't impressed with his hands being sticky.

Letting it rise under a damp cloth.

The risen dough after a 30 minute wait.  

Punching it down.  We might have punched it down too much.

Waiting for it to rise again.

This is what came out of the oven. It was more like biscotti (but soft inside) when cut than a loaf of bread; but I wasn't surprised at all.  The recipe called for white flour and sugar and I changed it to spelt flour and honey.  I find working with 100% spelt can be kind of  tricky.  I make spelt bread in our bread maker with success on most days, but this was my first time working with it by hand.  Maybe I should have followed my own recipe instead of a new one.  Oh well, It still tasted good and the boys kept asking for more. To them it was a success.