I make 9kg of bread every weekend (reasons). so when I wake up I start blooming the yeast: 3268gr of water, 109g of sugar, and about 20gr of yeast. I had to leave for something so I came back two hours later, it smelled amazing, next step is to mix in the salt (218gr) and flour (5440gr) , I usually put the flour first then salt. but this time I put the salt first.
What happened? it fizzled like a soda, like mixing baking soda and vinegar, so many bubbles appeared immediately. I noticed because of the sound it made (was looking at the scale numbers).
Obviously it cannot be a chemical reaction because salt does not really react with anything there, at most it kills some yeast cells before mixing because some parts would have high salt content. there has to be some cool biology involved. And I refuse to ask any AI for that
I agree that it is unlikely to be a chemical reaction. Instead, I suspect you are nucleating bubbles for the dissolved gasses in the solution (think diet coke and mentos).
When yeast is active, it creates CO2 as a byproduct. This is how you get bubbles on the top of your solution when you are blooming the yeast. This gas byproduct is also dissolved into the water as well. Letting it sit for that long would give it plenty of time to completely saturate the liquid (or even supersaturate it depending on environmental changes).
When you throw the salt in, those salt crystals act as a nice nucleation point allowing those dissolved gases to form a bubble and leave the liquid phase. I can’t really speak to how salt behaves differently to flour in this regard, but nucleation rate is proportional to the available surface area for nucleation, and salt crystals tend to not clump up nearly as much as flour, making more surface area accessible for nucleation.
I suspect you already know this since you make so much bread, but, I was always taught that introducing an osmotic shock like adding salt directly to your yeast will slow down the rising/proofing process. So, it would be best to add the flour, then the salt on top, then mix them together to help blunt the osmotic stress on your yeast.
( @ 🍉 Albert 🍉 @lemmy.world )
Better yet : put everything in water except the yeast so the water is already salted water before the yeast expands in it.
damn, didn’t think about nucleation. am a biologist and got so excited to find some strange biology, was wondering if the salt triggers some burst in metabolism as they die and their enzymes get everywhere. didn’t stop to consider the more obvious answer.
Had to scroll past some random factoids before getting to this answer.