Flour and Yeast

With all this new found time, I decided I wanted to try to learn to bake bread. Well, turns out it's hard to find yeast in the stores right now. My bread making will have to wait, but in the meantime, I learned these fun little tidbits from McGee's On Food and Cooking, cause I was like "What the hell is yeast, anyway?"

p. 531 - Flours
Both pastry and cake flours have low levels of weak gluten protein for making tender baked goods. Cake flour is distinctive because it's treated with chlorine dioxide or chlorine gas.

Leavenings are ingredients that fill doughs and batters with bubbles of gas, thus reducing the amount of solid materials in a given volume and making the bread or cake less dense and more light and tender.

p. 532 - Yeasts
The yeasts are a group of microscopic, single-celled fungi, relatives of the mushrooms. More than 100 species are known.