The short answer: YES! The longer answer: yes, but you’ll get a different product from using yeast.

Chemical leaveners tend to give you a more “loose” crumb. Not the nice, chewy quality you can get with yeast breads. But that may be what you want in a bread at the moment. Something that mixes up quickly, bakes quickly, and devoured quickly (because many of these turn out waaaay too good).

I tend to avoid baking too many quick breads, despite how tasty they turn out. My weakness is that I eat far too many slices when they’re readily available! Still, I do enjoy trying new flavors – both sweet breads like banana, and savory like soda bread or biscuits. In fact, I’ve found that baking powder bread makes a pretty good base for grilled cheese sandwiches. (Recipe at the end.)

If you’re interested in a more thorough rundown of bread baking in general see: Baking Bread at Home.

Chemical Leaveners vs. Yeast

The main difference lies in how the two leaveners work. As explained on a cooking site (I think it was StackExchange?), yeast needs time to slowly release carbon dioxide gas into dough. This extended fermentation allows gluten strands to stretch around the air bubbles, creating chewy elasticity. Baking powder or soda starts producing gas immediately when liquid is added. So there’s no time for gluten development, resulting in a fast rise and tender, cakey crumb.

Could combining both create an even fluffier bread? Unfortunately, no. The issue is not the amount of rise, but rather the dough’s capacity to hold air as it expands. Too much leavening can overload what gluten exists, causing bubbles to rupture and bread to deflate. Plus yeast and baking powder need different conditions to work properly.

But baking powder can certainly make tasty quick breads with decent rise and proper bread-like texture. For example, a simple no-knead recipe of flour, baking powder, milk, oil, sugar and salt bakes up nice and tall. Letting the loaf fully cool before slicing prevents crumbling. Then you can truly use it like regular sandwich bread for anything from toast to grilled cheese. And thanks to some added fat, it even stays moist a few days at room temp.

So rest assured that with baking powder instead of yeast, you can still enjoy delicious breads. You’ll just miss out on that stretchy chew that only yeast can provide. But for most sweet or savory applications, baking powder does the trick!

Basic White Sandwich Bread Without Yeast

I found this recipe at RecipeTin Eats. Wow, what a great site! Beautiful photography and yummy recipes.

Wanting to try a not-sweet quick bread I thought “why not?” This turned out pretty decent. And DO take her advice to not cut into the load until it’s completely cooled. Please do go over to her site to get a nice, printable copy of this recipe.

Sandwich Bread WITHOUT Yeast! (Dead Easy)

• 4 cups flour (all purpose)
• 8 tsp baking powder
• 3 tsp white sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 1/4 cups milk, room temp
• 1/4 cup oil (any neutral oil of your choice)

1. Preheat oven to 430°F.
2. Grease a 9″x 5″ loaf pan and line with parchment paper. Yes, both greasing and paper are necessary.
3. Mix the dry stuff.
4. Add the wet stuff. Stir until well mixed. It’ll be on the stiff side.
5. Scrape dough into loaf pan
6. Bake 30 minutes. Then cover with foil (not too tight) and return oven.
7. Turn oven temp down to about 390°F and bake another 20 minutes.
8. Take loaf out and let cool for 5-10 minutes before lifting it out of the pan. Let it fully cool on a rack.
9. After about an hour it should be cool enough to slice. But for best results wait until day 2 (personally, I couldn’t wait!).

This makes some fantastic, crispy toast. Butter it up and add some of your homemade jam. Using it for grilled cheese works well, too. But for regular cold-cut type sandwiches it does seem to be more delicate than yeast breads. Just handle gently if you’re making a big sandwich out of this.

My First Attempt at No-Yeast Bread

Because I only have one bread pan — which is small — my first try at this no-yeast recipe was a tad…. hilarious. The dough kept rising and rising in the pan and ended up becoming a bit lopsided.

Even though this happened I still consider it a success. The end product released from the pan very well (yay parchment paper!), and was really tasty when toasted.

In the future I’d like to experiment with adding other things into this dough. In particular I have a small bag of ground flax seed I’d like to use up, so that’s now ear-marked for the next no-yeast bread recipe.

So here’s my results…