How to Activate Yeast for a Braided Bread Recipe

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to show you how to make a braided wreath of bread. Okay, our first step is to activate our yeast. So we're going to take that water we have and pour it in our mixer just like that. Run the mixer on its lowest setting. We're going to take our yeast here and we're gong to drop that right in there with the water and just start mixing it up. And this also a good time to use your spatula too because you want to make sure you get all the yeast off the sides of the bowl. Turn it off for a second, scrape that down. What will happen is that some of the yeast as it hits the sides of the bowl will just kind of stick there and stay. So you want to make sure you scrape all that off. There we go. Put this back on the stir. Now we're going to let this activate, it just takes you know three or four minutes to get activated. So what we'll do to speed that up is, since yeast is an living organism the activation process is basically waking it up. But then to really activate you need to add some of your sugar. You don't need to add all of it yet, but add a little bit. Maybe about half. I know you hear kind of the grating sound of the whisk brushing up against the sugar brushing up against the bowl. It's not anything bad. To let this go here you can turn up the speed a little bit if you want. You know what I'm going to do, I'm going to lower this, I'm going to take my spatula, I'm going to scrape down, I got some sugar stuck on the side over here. I'll scrape that sugar down in to the yeast mixture. And now I'm going to let this yeast mixture sit for about two or three more minutes. It's going to let off a pretty funky smell, that's just the yeast activating so it's not anything bad. It's doesn't smell very good but nothings going wrong. So I'll let this go for about two or three minutes, we're going to come back to it and proceed to our next step."