Why yeast extract is in tons of foods (and why it's delicious)

yeast taste good and no i'm not talking about all the wonderful foods that yeast ferment for us like bread and beer i mean the yeasties themselves they taste good boil a packet of dry yeast in a little bit of water to kill the yeast maybe put in a little pinch of salt and taste the resulting broth you know what that tastes like it tastes like mushroom stock which i suppose should not have surprised me as much as it did considering that mushrooms and yeast are the same basic thing they're both edible funguses and so they taste a lot alike they both taste meaty as we have discussed in previous videos the fungal kingdom is arguably a lot closer to the animal kingdom than it is to the plant kingdom and fungi have a lot of the same kinds of things in their bodies as we animals do such as the amino acids that taste umami we need to eat protein to live and protein sources that are good for us are likely to contain glutemic acids and some related organic compounds and therefore we are evolved to find those compounds very very tasty that's umami that's the savory meaty sensation we get on our tongue and yeast have a lot of it again maybe you already knew this but i was completely floored by the taste of a boiled packet of bread yeast that is good soup and now i understand why so many processed foods have yeast extract on the ingredients check out the ingredients on nearly any dried soup product cup noodles or this one this lipton noodle soup look on the back and you will see yeast listed on the ingredients or more specifically a yeast extract that has been juiced out of the yeast that's it right there yeast extract that i juiced out myself i'll show you how i did that in just a minute boil that yeast juice down and mix it with some reduced vegetable broth and you'd basically have marmite this gooey brown stuff the brits like to spread on toast the aussies have a similar condiment they love called vegemite and if you taste this stuff it tastes a lot like that reduced yeast extract because that is in there it also tastes like celery and some of the other vegetables that they put in here especially concentrated vegetable stock is in here as well there's also a third distinct and very strong taste in here and that is the taste of beer indeed the story of yeast extract begins with beer when you brew beer there is a ton of leftover yeast way more yeast than you would ever need to brew your next batch and probably even more than the bakery down the street would need to rise their bread historically spent brewer's yeast was regarded as a waste product then came marmite a company founded in 1902 in the english beer brewing mecca of burton on trent according to the company's own history of themselves the founders based their concept on research done by the german food scientist eustis von liebig liebig is also the guy whose work led to the dubious chef wisdom that searing meat seals in the juices which it doesn't in his own lifetime liebig was much more famous for inventing a liquid meat extract that he said could replace a solid food diet which it couldn't but it did taste really good and liebig's product eventually became the english stock cube maker oxo liebig also did work on yeast and sometime in the 19th century he is purported to have done basically what i did here in my kitchen i took a whole jar of active dry bread yeast from the grocery store and i dumped that into water libig used some spent yeast from a brewer which probably would have come to him already suspended in some amount of water in his experiments liebig heated this solution to a balmy temperature that activated enzymes within the yeast cells i don't know what exact temperature he used but in 2007 these turkish researchers determined that the optimal temperature for making yeast extract is 50 degrees centigrade 122 fahrenheit so that's what i used unfortunately for me though 50 degrees c is kind of just below the minimum temperature that you can reliably hold in a domestic oven or on a gas stove top probably going to get a temperature a little higher than that and at that point you risk denaturing the enzymes in the yeast that we need for this process so electric heating pad took me a while to find the right setting and the right way to wrap this around the bowl to get my target temperature and even when i did the temperature suddenly shot up when my dried yeast woke up and they started metabolizing the energy stores in their little unicellular bodies that is their body heat thermogenesis i had to rip the heating pad off so that my solution did not overheat but then the yeast calmed down after a while because i didn't get any food to eat in that water so they just kind of stopped metabolizing my temperature plummeted so i had to put the heating pad back on and when i did that i was not able to get the temperature up high enough this just wasn't hot enough i was only able to hold my bowl at like 35 c for a day and basically nothing happened this is not yeast extract it's just warm yeast in warm water it tastes okay but not super strong and you generally don't want to eat very much live yeast and speaking of microorganisms in the gut the sponsor of today's video is ombre labs let me thank them for a sec the science on gut health is really still emerging but basically every researcher i talk to about nutrition is very excited about what we're learning about how the particular mixture of bacteria living in our digestive systems affects our metabolism our mood basically everything about our health and how we feel a foolproof test kit from ombre labs offers you a look inside your own microbiome you collect a tiny sample at home you send it in and here are my results based on the limited but really promising research that we have so far hombre is able to make recommendations as to how i might boost beneficial organisms in my gut and they're able to tell me what these buggies might be able to do for me looks like i could use more roseburria there's mouse studies showing that one as helping with weight loss and inflammatory diseases based on your results ombre will give you diet recommendations and if you want they'll offer you custom probiotics you could take to encourage good bacteria use my link in the description and you'll get 30 bucks off your test kit thirty dollars off at tryombre.com adam that's in the description thank you ombre labs but anyway yeah i could not get enough heat to squeeze the juice out of my yeast so i went out and i bought a much bigger heating pad i tied it snug around the bowl with a cute little scarf and there a perfect 50 degrees c i held it there for 24 hours which the aforementioned turkish researchers found is the optimal time to achieve what eustace von liebig achieved before me and that is yeast autolysis it's funny we just talked about autolysis last week when we were talking about gluten proteins in flour autolysis basically means cellular self-destruction at this temperature in water enzymes within the yeast cells break down their own cell walls causing their little yeasty guts to spill out into the solution and further reactions break down their proteins into more of the tasty umami amino acids and such that we like to eat that semi-clear liquid is the lysate the extracted cellular guts dissolved in water i should have just siphoned it off the top because my filter here did not do such a great job of removing the solids that had settled on the bottom those solids are what's left of the yeast cell walls that's what's in the slurry there cell wall debris it's often filtered out with a centrifuge at yeast extract factories i suppose it dilutes the flavor of the extract but i will say it actually makes kind of a nice thickener here's some homemade yeast extract that i did not filter at all i boiled it down i put in some onion powder and some celery seeds to mimic the vegetable flavors they add to marmite and that's honestly some good vegan gravy right there the cell wall debris gives it a really creamy texture i will say that creamy texture could be due in part to an additive that they put in grocery store bread yeast like this it's called sorbitin monosterate it's an emulsifier they put it in there to keep the yeast from getting too dry when they're in storage and also it helps the yeast to rehydrate inside the dough seems possible to me that this additive is forming a water and oil emulsion here in this solution with the lipids naturally present in the yeast and that might be contributing to that creamy texture and also might be making my extract harder to filter i basically have yeasty mayonnaise coming up the works but for what it's worth i also did a test with an organic yeast packet that does not have any emulsifier inside it and when i boiled that down to a paste it still had a somewhat creamy texture so who knows all i know is according to the story eustis von liebig filtered the solids out of his lysate he boiled it down to a glaze and he was struck by how closely the taste of that resembled a reduced animal stock that's basically vegan demi-glace quite tasty so based on liebig's experiments these folks built a factory in burton on trent and they tried to work out a process for converting cheap ubiquitous spent brewers yeast into a food fit for human consumption one problem they ran into is that brewer's yeast is covered in bitter residues from the hops you have to de-bitter the yeast and even after they do marmite is still a little bitter i'm told most people who eat this on toast do a very thin layer and then they cut it with some butter i do think that's quite tasty but it does still very much taste like beer whereas the extract that i made from bread yeast does not nor does this so-called nutritional yeast taste like beer not at all this company says they grow their own yeast in a molasses solution rather than getting it from brewers so there's no hops residue there's no grain residues but it's not a yeast extract it's whole yeast baked until they die and they form little flakes that you can use as a seasoning it's quite tasty but not nearly as strong as the extract because of all of the cell wall debris that's still in there i assume i had hoped to be able to give you a practical recipe for homemade yeast extract there are a lot of ones on the internet and they all have big problems in my opinion and i did not do any better one problem is that this bottle of yeast is six dollars and you want to see how much extract i was able to get out of it this much that's what i got not very cost effective i also do worry about the sorbitan monosteroid content in here the emulsifier every food safety agency on earth considers that stuff perfectly safe in the amounts that you would eat if you were using a little dry yeast to bake a whole loaf of bread i have no idea how much of it you would end up eating in a concentrated yeast extract and i have no idea if that amount would be safe no idea i figured i could remedy both of these problems by simply growing my own yeast at home from one little starter packet i put one little packet into about a gallon of sugar water and i watched it bubble for a few days before i realized that i'm basically making rum here this is now a terrible tasting alcoholic beverage that you could distill into rum the thing about making alcoholic beverages it's actually kind of tricky to do well you could get all kinds of contaminants in here this had a pretty funky smell and the bread yeast seemed to shut down long before they'd fermented all of the expensive sugar i gave them there's not that many yeasties in there and i was totally unable to filter them out of my stanky bathtub hooch maybe you can figure out a good way to grow yeast at home for extract or maybe you could get it from a friend to home brews problem is then you would have to de-bitter it and apparently the processes that they use for de-bittering yeast at the factory are pretty industrial pretty intense not easy to replicate at home so maybe just buy yeast extract instead here in the states i get marmite at the grocery store publix which has a british import section hashtag not an ad this is the same import section that has these oxo cubes that are nearly solid yeast extract there's no animal product at all in these people originally considered yeast extract to be an adulterant in stock cubes a cheap imitation of real meat but i think this stuff is great in its own right and i'm not even a vegan if you are a vegan definitely check out yeast extract it's rich in the b vitamins that can be tough to get if you don't eat any animal products indeed researchers like this american chemist in 1916 came to understand the necessity of b vitamins in part through their experiments with yeast they fed pigeons a diet of only plain white rice and the birds got really weak and wobbly same thing happens to humans we call the resulting disease beriberi the researchers gave those pigeons white rice fortified with yeast extract and the pigeons got better because b vitamins yeast one of humanity's best friends

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,802,614

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Id: 7zEWtqkp1v8

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021