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    use a knife or credit card to divide the yeast into three separate piles Nah, a razor blade and a rolled up dollar bill....wait, wrong kind of powder. Technically what the yeast does is a S-curve, with a lag phase that is shortened by adding more yeast, so that you reach the logistic growth more rapidly. However, that's at least 5x as much yeast as you put in initially... Commented Dec 8, 2025 at 0:04
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    @bob1 I'm a mathematician, not a biologist. If you want to fix the model, be my guest. That said, a logistic growth model is basically exponential until you hit something around half the carrying capacity. And I would also expect the yeast to start dying off, rather than just plateauing in population (as they use up all of the available resources). So my expectation is that, once the yeast "wake up", they'll doubly roughly every 90 minutes for the first couple of hours, until there are enough yeast to start stressing the resources in the dough. Commented Dec 8, 2025 at 0:09
  • It's close enough for cooking, so I'll leave it. It's just my day job as a microbiologist that tells me to offer the explanation. It's not quite true about the doubling either; the lag is not doubling in the time frames suggested as the yeast need to create a suitable environment to grow exponentially, which they can only do once they reach a certain density, but again, it's not a problem for your answer either. Commented Dec 8, 2025 at 0:13
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    @bob1 Again, I am being completely genuine here. I managed to get through high school, an undergraduate degree, a masters degree, and a phd without ever taking biology. I don't really know how it works, beyond some very basic first order approximations. If you have a better explanation, I would very much appreciate it if you could edit it into the answer. Commented Dec 8, 2025 at 0:18