Yeast Science Project: If you don’t know it already (which means you haven’t done The Yeast Beast project), yeast is in the air. If you set out a mixture of flour and water and a touch of sugar, this wild yeast will start to eat your flour mixture and ferment it. You’ll know when this happens when froth starts on top of the dough.
This is all explained very nicely in a boingboing blog post called Yeast? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Yeast. And – a warning – there’s not so nice pictures of fermenting yeast! To learn even more about it read this page on Exploratorium.
Yeast is just fascinating on a lot of levels. And a yeast science project is almost too easy to do. You can usually get anything you need at the supermarket and results are almost instantaneous. The fermentation of yeast is a chemical change, and there are tons of different demonstrations and experiments that you can use for your science fair.
Our “The Yeast Beast” project, for example, is advertised as a demonstration, but it can also be done as a science experiment, and instructions for doing it that way are in the guide.