Last Updated on April 12, 2024 by Fasting Planet
If you’re making bread, which is decidedly vegan, you’re going to need yeast. The same is true of any savory dish or dessert that starts as a dough and needs to rise, including biscuits, croissants, pizza dough, or muffins. Can vegans use yeast or is it considered an animal product or byproduct?
Yeast is acceptable on the vegan diet, but considering its status as a living fungus, some vegans do avoid it. These vegans likely also don’t eat mushrooms for the same reason.
Wait, yeast is alive? Indeed, it is. Keep reading for more on all things yeast, including what it is, whether it’s vegan, and what vegans who eschew yeast will use instead. You’re not going to want to miss it!
What Is Yeast?
Yeast is a leavening agent that allows ingredients to rise. It’s also part of the fungus kingdom, which is among at least five other kingdoms, including Animalia and Plantae. The kingdom that yeast belongs to is known as the Kingdom Fungi.
All yeast microorganisms are single-celled. It’s believed that yeast came from multicellular fungi and that some yeasts can even become multicellular themselves if they attach to other budded cells in an act called pseudohyphae.
When yeast is added to certain ingredients, it activates the production of carbon dioxide gas. It’s the gas that encourages your pizza dough or bread dough to rise, not the yeast itself. This type of yeast has a nickname: baker’s yeast. It’s the dry, powdered stuff that comes in jars or packets that you buy at your local grocery store.
Besides its use in food production, yeast also plays a critical role in winemaking and beermaking. When yeast goes into wine, it takes the sugars from the wine grapes and makes them into alcohol during fermentation. If fermentation didn’t occur, wine would be no different than grape juice! Yeast helps beer ferment in much the same way, segmenting sugars from the grains to produce both carbon dioxide and alcohol.
Scientists, doctors, and researchers use yeast not for making food, but for pharmaceutical drug testing. Yeast sometimes even aids in the creation of medications, so it’s useful in a variety of ways.
Baking yeast is very nutritionally sparse. Per a 17-gram or 0.6-ounce serving of baker’s yeast, you’d consume:
- 18 calories
- 3 grams of total fat
- 2 grams of monounsaturated fat
- 0 milligrams of cholesterol
- 5 milligrams of salt (2 percent of your daily recommended value)
- 1 grams of carbs (1 percent of your daily recommended value)
- 4 grams of dietary fiber (5 percent of your daily recommended value)
- 0 grams of sugar
- 4 grams of protein (2 percent of your daily recommended value)
- 3 percent iron
- 5 percent vitamin B6
- 1 percent magnesium
Some types of baker’s yeast may be fortified with extra minerals and vitamins. Otherwise, it’s considered a relatively good source of vitamin B6 but not so much any other nutrients.
Is Yeast Vegan?
Baker’s yeast isn’t exactly complex in its ingredients. It’s just the yeast culture or strain itself and sometimes molasses. The yeast strain added to baker’s yeast is almost always Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a single-celled yeast species that’s long since been favored for brewing, baking, and winemaking.
That short ingredients list tells you that yeast is not a direct animal product. However, since it’s a member of the Kingdom Fungi, it falls into a sort of gray area for some vegans.
We discussed this in our post about whether mushrooms are vegan. The big concern among vegans is that mushrooms and other creatures in the Kingdom Fungi are alive. Yes, it’s as we said in the intro. Yeast is indeed alive, and that goes for baker’s yeast as well.
If yeast wasn’t living, then how could it kickstart the conversion process of making wine ingredients into alcohol or producing carbon dioxide so your pizza dough can rise? Simply put, it couldn’t.
Vegans don’t eat meat simply because it’s meat, but because the animal is alive. As a living creature, the way that meat is sourced to make chicken, veal, steak, ham, or whatever dish is very inhumane.
Animals are cruelly separated from their mothers at very young ages, stuffed into small cages and enclosures, fed only what it takes to keep them alive, and then harvested for their milk or eggs or fur for as long as they’re valuable. When they’re not, the animal is killed.
Some people make themselves feel better about their meat-eating diets by reminding themselves that animals aren’t sentient. Yet animals can absolutely feel pain, just like you and I, from chickens put to slaughter to fish that are hooked and pulled out of the water.
It’s being proven that more animals are sentient. This Psychology Today article from 2015 goes into rich detail about the sentiency of pigs. The title even calls them “cognitively complex,” “emotional,” and “intelligent.” In other words, pigs are useful for far more than bacon or ham.
A Smithsonian article published in 2018 describes how even fishy friends feel emotions such as fear and distress. This indicates that any living thing could be sentient, but whether they all are, we just don’t know.
What we are sure of is that several members of the Kingdom Fungi are not sentient. Mushrooms, for one, do not feel fear when you pluck them from a tree or harvest them from the ground. If you slice and dice a mushroom for a salad or grill one for a vegan-friendly burger, you’re not causing the mushroom pain.
It’s the same story with yeast. Yes, yeast is alive, but is it sentient? No. Yeast lacks a nervous system and so thus it cannot be sentient. When you add yeast to wine or bread dough, it doesn’t feel anything, pain or otherwise.
That makes baker’s yeast perfectly safe for vegans to eat. However, the same vegans who refuse to consume mushrooms since they’re living things will also likely avoid yeast.
What about Nutritional Yeast? Can Vegans Eat That?
As a new vegan, you hear about nutritional yeast all the time, but you have yet to try it. What it is?
Nutritional yeast is made from yeast cells that are deactivated and often dead. It has a yellow hue and a flavor that’s cheesy and nutty, sometimes even both. That’s why vegans prefer nutritional yeast as part of their diets, as it can be used to impart cheesy flavor to all their favorite dishes while still remaining dairy-free.
The same strain of yeast that’s in baker’s yeast–Saccharomyces cerevisiae–is standard for nutritional yeast as well. This type of yeast does have some side effects that you don’t have to worry about as often when using baker’s yeast.
For example, if you have Crohn’s disease or another form of inflammatory bowel disease, you might find it hard to process nutritional yeast. The yeast can aggravate your IBD symptoms to the point where you cannot eat it. Even those without Crohn’s may have the same problem digesting nutritional yeast.
The niacin or vitamin B3 in nutritional yeast could make your face flush too according to a 2010 report from The Journal of Clinical Investigation. This occurs due to how much niacin in is nutritional yeast, which is about double what you should ingest daily.
Those side effects notwithstanding, since nutritional yeast is dead or deactivated, it’s no longer considered a living thing. Those vegans who have qualms about consuming baker’s yeast shouldn’t feel the same way about nutritional yeast. It’s vegan-safe.
What Are Some Vegan-Friendly Yeast Alternatives?
If you’d rather not ingest baker’s yeast and nutritional yeast gives you an upset stomach, what other options do you have as a vegan to get your baked goods to rise? Plenty!
Double-Acting Baking Powder
The primary ingredients in baking powder are cream of tartar and baking soda. When combined, they can make carbon dioxide so your dough rises. By getting the double-acting stuff, you’ll have twice the carbon dioxide.
The first time the baking powder will release carbon dioxide occurs when you stir in liquid ingredients. Then when you heat up the double-acting baking powder in the oven, that second burst of carbon dioxide comes through.
The same quantities of double-acting baking powder can be used to replace baking yeast in a recipe.
Lemon Juice and Baking Soda
Another means of creating carbon dioxide so your dough rises is to mix lemon juice and baking soda. We already talked about baking soda in the context of double-acting baking powder. The lemon juice makes the baking soda fizz up so your dough rises.
You need equal quantities of baking soda as you do lemon juice. Then ensure you have enough of the mixture to replace the quantity of baking yeast required in the recipe. If you don’t have lemon juice handy, you can use milk or buttermilk instead.
Self-Rising Flour
This one only works if your recipe is yeast-free, so that’s something to keep in mind. You don’t sub out the self-rising flour for the yeast, but rather, however much flour is in your recipe. Just make sure you don’t combine both yeast and self-rising flour or your dough will end up rising too high and flowing out of the bowl!
Since self-rising flour is made from baking powder and salt, you’ll want to reduce the quantities of both in your recipe if those ingredients are needed. You may also want a pinch or two of extra sugar in sweet recipes to cancel out the saltiness.
Conclusion
Yeast, like mushrooms and other creatures in the Kingdom Fungi, is a living fungus. That fact alone is enough to give some vegans pause, but often unnecessarily. Unlike living creatures like cows, pigs, and fish, yeast cannot feel pain or fear. It has no nervous system to allow for sentience.
If you’d still rather play it completely safe and avoid baker’s yeast, you can always try nutritional yeast or yeast-free alternatives like self-rising flour, lemon juice and baking soda, or double-acting baking powder.