See Oh Two

Remember the Culture? Not the Iain M. Banks civilization, interesting as that is. I mean the yeast from last week’s post Culture is Science.

You’ll recall I mentioned that its primary role in the whole baking business is the production of carbon dioxide. Well, you only see that indirectly via the results of the baking, of course, but while it was going through the ten day growth phase, I got the chance (after feeding it on day 5) to get some nice pictures of the swollen bag that results from its generation of the gas after its munching down on flour and sugar:

yeast_2 yeast_1 yeast_3

Impressive huh? It was filling up almost daily after day five. Now, if I’d thought about it at the time, I’d have done a demo and poured (since CO2 is heavy) the gas out of the bag onto a lit candle and watched it gone out and made a video of all of that for you. Let’s pretend I did that…

-cvj

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3 Responses to See Oh Two

  1. Pingback: Bakin’ at Asymptotia

  2. Pingback: Products of Culture at Asymptotia

  3. Kortney says:

    Impressive indeed! And for a moment, maybe all the lights of the universe could fade to black.
    Silly scientist….tricks are for kids 🙂
    But isn’t it fascinting to work with starter in the creation of bread, then think of the starter going all the back into time, to, well… the beginning.
    Gives great insight to the meaning of “breaking bread” and sharing with friends.
    The Greeks have a saying (translated sounds like ‘psi how who weeah’ the meaning of ‘to entertain’)is… to share good company, good food, good wine and intellectual conversation.
    Let’s pretend we did that…
    Cheers all!