So, I was in the kitchen the other day, you know, getting ready to do some baking. Had my flour out, my active dry yeast, all the usual suspects. And then a thought just popped into my head, like they sometimes do when you’re busy with something else. Does sugar itself actually have yeast in it? I mean, we feed yeast sugar, right? So, does the sugar come with its own little yeast buddies already packed in?
My Little Experiment Setup
I figured, why not try a little experiment? Nothing too scientific, just a quick test in my own kitchen. Here’s what I did:
- I grabbed a couple of clean glass jars. Just regular jam jars, washed out.
- In the first jar, I put a couple of spoonfuls of plain white granulated sugar. The kind you get from any grocery store. Then I added some lukewarm water, stirred it up until the sugar dissolved.
- Just to be sure, I set up a sort of control, though it wasn’t super strict. In a second jar, I put a tiny pinch of actual baker’s yeast, a spoonful of sugar, and lukewarm water. This was just so I could see what active yeast should look like.
- I loosely covered both jars. Didn’t seal them tight, just put the lids on without screwing them down, or you could use a bit of cloth.
Watching and Waiting
Then, I just left them on the kitchen counter. Out of direct sunlight, but not in a cold spot either. My kitchen’s usually pretty average temperature-wise.
Day 1: Checked them in the evening. The jar with the actual baker’s yeast? Oh yeah, that one was starting to get a bit foamy on top. You could see tiny bubbles. The jar with just sugar and water? Looked pretty much the same. Just sugary water. No bubbles, no foam, nothing exciting.
Day 2: The yeast-and-sugar jar was definitely active. More foam, and if you got close, you could smell that yeasty, bready smell. The plain sugar-water jar? Still nothing. I mean, absolutely flat. I swirled it a bit, hoping to see something, but nope. It was just clear, sweet water.
I kept an eye on it for another day or so, just in case it was a very slow starter. But honestly, there were no signs of fermentation at all in the jar that only had sugar and water.
So, What Did I Figure Out?
From my little kitchen test, it seems pretty clear that the refined white sugar I use does not come with its own yeast. If it did, I should have seen some bubbling, some activity, some sign of life in that jar, especially after a couple of days in a warmish room. But there was nothing.
Of course, this isn’t a super high-tech lab experiment. Maybe some unprocessed sugars, like raw cane juice or something straight from the field, might have wild yeasts hanging around. That’s a whole different story. But for the stuff most of us have in our sugar bowls? It looks like it’s just sugar, plain and simple.
It makes sense, really. The refining process for sugar is pretty intense, likely killing off or removing any yeast that might have been there originally. So, when we’re baking and want things to rise, we definitely need to add that yeast ourselves. The sugar is just the food for the yeast we introduce.
So, that was my little adventure into the world of sugar and yeast. Simple, but it satisfied my curiosity!
