A Revolution in Baking (continued)

Baking good bread wasn’t always so easy. Even after the Civil War, American home and commercial bakers had to grow their own yeast and work hard to keep it alive. Before the Fleischmann Brothers invented commercial yeast, people baked bread like the Egyptians 4,000 years earlier. Each family, or bakery, kept a crock of sourdough or other "starter" or "leavener." They were living cultures of yeast growing slowly in a flour-and- water dough saved from the last batch of bread.

People horded and fought over their starters. Pioneer families carried a crock of starter West in covered wagons. They had to tend their microorganisms, and the care and feeding of starter took some work. The crock of starter needed regular feedings of flour and water. On cold nights, someone slept with the crock to keep the yeast warm and alive. If the starter died, you had to borrow some from a friend, or leave a container of flour and water in the open air to catch wild yeast floating by. Before baking day, the starter might get a little extra flour and sugar to make the yeast grow faster. Then a little starter went into the new batch of bread, and a little stayed in the crock for next baking day. It took a long time for the starter to work, and make the bread rise. Baking bread took an entire day.

When Charles and Maximillian Fleischmann arrived in Cincinnati in the 1860s, they discovered another problem with home-kept yeast: It often didn’t work very well. American bread seemed to have a dense, heavy texture and unpleasant taste, compared to the light flavorful loaves of "Vienna" bread that the brothers made at home. The immigrants left their home, just outside Budapest, Hungary, for a new life in America. They realized that yeasts were the problem, and saw the need for a uniform product that would perform reliably every time without the fuss of tending microbes. With money from businessman James W. Gaff in 1868, they invented a way to make large amounts of baking yeast, and patented the process.

The process involved growing yeast in tanks of a nutrient solution called "wort." It contained plenty of sugar for the microbes to feed on and multiply. As the number of yeast cells increased, the wort became thick and creamy. Workers then separated the yeast from the wort, and compressed it into cube-like "cakes" that were packaged for sale.

Fleischmann's yeast became a national commercial success after Charles and Max set up a bakery concession at the Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition, a World's Fair held in 1876. About 10 million people visited the fair. Many sampled fresh-baked bread from the Fleischmann’s "Vienna Bakery," and learned that they could make the same loaves at home with the Brothers’ Compressed Yeast Cake.