Expert: Heinz Henze - 11/23/2008

Question
I have an old recipe that calls for one "cake" of yeast.  Is that equivalent to one envelope of yeast?

Answer
Hi Denise,

Cake yeast comes in 2 sizes, a .6 oz. cake and a 2 oz. cake.  One packet of active dry yeast is equivalent to one .6 oz. cake.  Now which size is the recipe calling for...we don't know.  But one .6 oz cake can raise about 4 cups or 1 pound of flour.  Now since this is a home recipe I don't think that it would call for more than the 4 cups of flour (a 2 oz. cake of yeast will raise about 12 cups of flour).  So I would try the recipe using 1 packet of dry active yeast and see how it goes, like a practice run. And remember that some of these old recipes are a little tricky due to differences in ingredients that we have today.  I have a few very old recipes from my grandfather that took a little tweaking due to the refining and production processes we use for ingredients today as compared to 100 years ago.  Hope everything works out great and happy baking.

Have a great day,

Heinz