I hear you dspen! I'll be interested to read the responses to your question. I have my aunt's old recipe for butterhorns that calls for cake yeast. When I use the dry yeast they lack that yeasty flavor and are not nearly as good. I've asked at the grocery store and was told they don't carry cake yeast anymore because the demand is low and the shelf life short. Someone suggested asking a bakery if I could purchase some but that seems like a lot of bother. The result is that I just don't make them any more.

According to what I've read in my recent bread baking study, there are only about 3 strains of yeast that make bread rise. There are dozens in all, but when a yeast culture is mature, the others are squeezed out and the rising yeast dominates. Or something like that. I'm no expert.

According to Wikipedia: Baker's yeast is of the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae, but a different strain than is used by brewers. Saccharomyces exiguus (also known as S. minor) is a wild yeast found on plants, fruits, and grains ... comes from being propagated in a sourdough starter.

Fleischmann's has a nice little outline about yeast.

Anyway, it's not the brand of yeast you're buying that makes the difference. Most bakers are trying to get rid of the yeasty taste, so you can surely develop it!

Yeasty tasting breads, in my experience, are ones with more yeast. Simple as that. They put extra yeast in the pizza dough so that it'll be ready fast and they can load it up with toppings and still have it rise. A lot of "easy" bread recipes have a huge amount of yeast in them so it'll rise fast and you don't have to wait around for it to multiply. If you can get your hands on cake yeast, all the better, but you can achieve it with dry. Proof your yeast with some of the liquid in the recipe, preferably warm (baby bottle temp), and some of the flour, or the sugar if it's in the recipe. A couple of tablespoons will do, plus the yeast and a cup of water or milk. Once it's all bubbly and blooming, make your dough. This is good to do anyway if you might have old yeast. If it doesn't bubble and rise, you haven't lost a whole batch's worth of ingredients.

I hope this works for you. Good luck!

Fresh cake yeast is the key, I think. Depending on where you live, you may be able to find fresh cake yeast at ethnic markets or make friends with a bakery and ask if they will sell you some. The older local stores may have it or ask if they can get it for you.

Be sure to read up on the internet about using fresh yeast, as it is quite different from the dry yeast on the market.

Teresa

Diane, it may seem counter intuitive, but to get more yeast taste, use less yeast. The way it works for most pizza shops is that they make the dough the day before and keep it slightly cool , and don't use it till the following day. When making it at home, it is pretty common for people to let the dough bulk ferment at a cool temp ( fancy way of saying first rise ) for several days. Either way, they use less yeast because the longer it takes to fully develop, the more flavor the yeast creates.

With bread, it is more common to use another technique, which is using a poolish, ( or a biga or sponge ). You take say 1/3 of the overall dough and add 1/3 of the water and just a touch of yeast and let that ferment overnight, then the next day, you add the rest of the flour, water, salt, and yeast. The overnight fermentation gives it a much more developed flavor. The link is to a lesson from the Fresh Loaf, it describes the first step as a sponge - but for this purpose, it is the same thing as a biga or poolish - just a head start to allow the yeast to slowly develop. I didn't link lesson one, but you can find it on that site - it uses what we call the straight method - no sponge or poolish and as the lesson 3 points out, the one with the sponge had a richer flavor. As to yeasts, generally the type of yeast doesn't impact the flavor much unless you use a wild yeast, also known as a starter or a sourdough yeast.

Here is a link that might be useful: lesson from the fresh loaf.

Yeast bread is a many wondrous thing.....

I agree, cake yeast may be the key, but it's nearly impossible to find these days unless you can find a place of business that uses it and they are willing to sell you some. Most restaurants and bakeries use SAF-Instant yeast around here for their fresh breads because that's what is available from the restaurant supply store. Active Dry Yeast and Instant Dry Yeast brands don't have the same yeasty flavor that Fresh Cake Yeast has.

Restaurants could also be using recipes where they have more yeast in them to make rolls faster. I have used a recipe from "Whole Wheat Cookery - Treasures from the Wheat Bin" by Howard and Anna Ruth Beck for 30-Minute Hamburger Buns, which is a good example of this method. It uses 6 T. of yeast for 10-1/2 cups of flour, and it literally takes you 10-minutes to mix and knead the dough and then you form the buns (eliminate the first rise), 10-minutes to let the formed buns rise, and 10-minutes to bake them. They DO taste yeasty, but it's not the "best" bread recipe, but it works when you need rolls or buns quickly. This type of recipe makes sense for a restaurant who may need fresh rolls quickly.

You could switch to recipes from "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" and "Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day" by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D., and Zoe Francois - where the dough is quickly mixed by hand, allowed to rise and then stored in the refrigerator and see if you like the flavor of those breads.

Pizza dough is refrigerated in most places, where it has time to develop flavor. If dough is frozen first, it has more yeast in the dough than a regular recipe will because a percentage of yeast dies when frozen, so more is used in order to have it rise when thawed. A good recipe designed for freezer dough will have more yeast in the recipe.

When dough is refrigerated (aka retarding the dough) bacteria produce wonderfully tasty acids in the cool temperatures. The cold forces the yeast into dormancy so it's not consuming the available sugars. Now the bacteria can feed and produce flavorful acids. You may even find a difference in flavor of your yeast breads if you have a cold kitchen temperature in the winter, and the dough takes longer to rise, than in the much warmer summertime kitchen.

There are also tradeoffs from retarding the dough - it reduces ovenspring and loaf volume. Chilling the dough also influences the texture of the dough and you will get a slightly more open texture. A little tip if you use an overnight chilling method. After chilling, you can dissolve a little yeast (1/2 t.) in a few tablespoons of warm water and knead this into the dough before shaping. This will help compensate for the reduced volume.

For every rule there is for making yeast breads, there are exceptions, and it's often the exceptions that make a great deal of difference.

-Grainlady

You could also work with a sourdough yeast/lactibacillus starter, but given that you think talking to baker personnel, I'd be surprised if you were interested in something you have to feed every day for at least two weeks.
The flavors are nice though. I just finished a sourdough biscuit leftover from yesterday for my breakfast.
I agree that both the type of yeast and the time it's allowed to digest the sugars in the flour makes a difference.

Thanks so much for all of the responses and great info!!

I have tried the pizza dough where you make it the day before and let it proof itself over night. The crust turns out very nice but lacks that flavor I am looking for. I will try the sponge approach and maybe see if I can locate cake yeast.

I suppose its trail and error. And I don't bake everyday, so the chances for trying different techniques are few and far between. I am also sure that everyone has there own definition of what tastes the best!!

Diane