When I moved out on my own and got an apartment in California, I got tired of Wonder Bread or the other commercially made breads in the store and, if I thought about going to a bakery, I decided that I would try my hand at baking my own bread. When my mom was alive, most of the bread we ate was bread that she had baked, but she died when I was pretty young, and I never learned to bake bread. That was kind of a girl thing so I probably wouldn't have learned to bake bread regardless. Anyhow, I looked at the recipes and, since I didn't want to bake anything fancy, it seemed easy enough. The recipe called for sugar but I couldn't imagine why I'd want my bread to taste sugary sweet, so I skipped that part. It wouldn't rise, so I called my aunt in Michigan to see what I had done wrong. She told me that the sugar was necessary in order to activate the yeast and that my dough wouldn't rise because I had left out the sugar and the yeast didn't have anything to eat. Something like that, anyhow. The next time I decided to try it, I used sugar and it worked great. It took a few tries before I could make bread that was worth a damn, but the dough rose. Then I tried putting less and less sugar in it, and I found that it didn't take nearly as much sugar as the recipes called for in order to activate the yeast. With or without it, the bread didn't taste sweet, anyhow. This was fine because I didn't want it to. Many years later, I learned that sugar really isn't a necessary ingredient in bread, the chief difference being that it takes longer for the dough to rise without sugar. Without the sugar, the yeast has to break down the starch into sugar, and that takes longer. If you feed the yeast sugar, it becomes more active more quickly. Either way, the sugar is broken down in such a way that the bread doesn't taste sweet regardless of whether sugar is used or not. The really sad thing is that I can't even call my aunt to tell her she was wrong because she died a long time ago. At this point, I have no living aunts and only one living uncle - and he's sick. Now that I'm married and my wife likes baking bread now and then, I don't make my own bread anymore anyhow. I didn't suck too badly at it, though.
@Ken Anderson The "trick" to dough rising is easy to understand once one thinks about it enough. I didn't start such thinking until not very many years ago......just understood my Grandma's wonderful homemade rye bread was light and spongy due to yeast. Yeast feeds on sugar, producing Ethanol and Carbon Dioxide gas. The gas expands within the sticky dough, puffing it up. But soon, the heat of baking kills the yeast, and gas production ceases. The amount of extra sugar contained, un-eaten by the yeast, gets human-eaten. Usually, "raised-dough" like bread is allowed to "rise" before exposure to the hot oven. But, where did the alcohol go? The other way to make dough rise is use of a basic compound, base meaning alkaline, which reacts with an acid to form CO2 just like yeast. Heat-tolerant, it makes cakes rise. Nowhere near the gas-producing ability of yeast, though. So, try using some Baking Soda, which is Sodium Bicarbonate, instead of sugar, and no yeast. The acid needed to work the Soda is not added to the mix, I believe it comes from the water contained in the ingredients, which having been exposed to air, becomes acidic due to CO2 in the air dissolving in it, producing Carbonic Acid in the water. Your mention of yeast working with starch, I am not sure of. Yeast having the ability to convert starch to sugar is a new idea for me, so, the doubting skeptic........... Frank
Sourdough bread generally doesn't use sugar. Given enough time, the yeast will break down the starch in flour to produce enough sugar to rise the bread.
@Don Alaska But is that length of time less than the time needed to wind up with a black cinder, instead of bread? Frank
@Ken Anderson Interesting little experiment Ms. Schaub did! She seemed to concentrate on taste, where my main interest lies in consistency, light, fluffy, with lots of "air holes", or heavy and dense. Some slices of my Oro-Wheat Rye have large enough holes present as to allow condiments to "leak through" my sandwich. I don't like that. Frank
@Don Alaska True enough, but then the risen dough is "punched down", before baking, eliminating much of the "rise", according to the yeast dough recipe I use, and then it rises some more during baking. Baking a cake, using acid/base rise, evidently heat is no problem, the dough is put immediately in the oven after mixing. I still believe heating kills yeast spores, so the rising from yeast activity must occur before it dies. No? Frank
Most normal bread recipes require two rises. First The bread is allowed to rise, then punched down and divided into pans. The dough is allowed to rise a second time prior to putting it in the oven. The are single-rise recipes out there, but they tend to yield a more coarse bread. Sourdough uses wild yeast culture and can be done without sugar. Sourdough-type bread is what was used to bake bread before package yeasts were "invented". There are also batter-type breads that usually use an acid and base (usually bicarbonate) such as Irish Soda Bread. The soda breads are also quite coarse in texture. Sometimes coarseness is desirable and is deliberately done in yeast breads as well. The CO2 generated is captured in the gluten network, but that is not as necessary in soda breads, and is why all gluten-free breads I know about are chemically raised instead of yeast raised.