It seems that I wrongly thought that "instant yeast" was what we call "lievito istantaneo", i.e. baking powder, that would give a a pretty different end-product.

It looks like it can also refer to instant active yeast, i.e. dehydrated beer yeast, that should actually be fine as far as I can tell (I have no idea of exact proportions however).

Officially, I understood you couldn't use dry yeast, that has changed it seems: https://www.pizzanapoletana.org/en/ricetta_pizza_napoletana

That being said, you can probably use a smaller amount of instant yeast, it definitely shouldn't be replaced as a 1:1 with regular yeast as the fermentation time is an integral part of the flavour profile.

Dehydrated yeast will work, but getting the amounts right is more difficult in my experience. I can cut a paper-thin sliver from a yeast cube easier than than I can count the right number of grains of dehydrated yeast.

Grams are a thing ;)

Most people have a hard time measuring 0.02% baking percentage of 200g flour. Not because they don't know what grams is, but because they don't have the equipment or means to measure it.

Everytime I hear someone say things about units, it is not that people don't understand - there are other issues around that. For example, Americans know that metric system is better but they can't just switch solo until the entire nation changes which is a huge task.

Furthermore, those people who gawk at Americans still use 360 degrees for a full circle, 24 hour segments in a day and other weird units - for e.g. Switzerland still uses points for fonts! Not mm.

I would go ahead and even say - Metric system is based on base 10 which sucks, we should rewind back the history and grow 12 fingers because Duodecimal system is far better than decimal system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal

We are just stuck with base 10. Just like Americans are stuck with their archaic units. It has nothing to do with the fact that people are smart/dumb. I am gonna push back on that nonsense.

In my opinion, the only way to cook/bake is with a digital scale, and as far as I know, any scale you'd buy in the US has the option of grams or ounces at the push of a button.

In practice, I constantly use both. To some extent it depends on the packaging of the ingredients, which may use either unit.

When measuring small things, it's only practical to use teaspoons and fractions, but otherwise I weigh everything. I even tend to weigh liquids in dry ounces sometimes, as I've memorized 8 fluid ounces = 8.337 dry ounces.

Using different measuring systems is no more of a mark of inferiority than using different languages. And similarly to languages, modern technology makes it fairly easy to translate even if you don't know.

It is definitely a misconception that you don't see metric measurements in the US. They're everywhere, including your car, school, stores...

For this sort of dough you may need e.g. 1.8g of yeast (that's the actual quantity I used for the last dough I made). It depends on how much flour you make, of course, but pizza doughs with long fermentation use minute amounts of yeast. If you use 1.6g or 2.0g instead of 1.8g, your pizza may be ready twelve hours too soon or too late.

I bought a second kitchen scale to deal with the minute quantities, since my old one is accurate to only 1g.

"your pizza may be ready twelve hours too soon or too late"

It's one of those pitfalls, kind of like having your tire pressure off by 1.5 psi* at a cars and coffee...

*https://jalopnik.com/how-not-to-explain-why-you-crashed-your...

> for e.g. Switzerland still uses points for fonts! Not mm.

Anybody who deals with typography in any professional capacity does so. It is the normal, not some obscure Swiss habit.

That's my point that supports "America is the only country in the world that still doesn't use metric units." - well, they tried. Many times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...

It is sometimes hard to get rid of 100+ years of history, in the case of typography thats probably longer.

As far as I know, beer yeast is different from bread yeast these days. Instant yeast for baking is said to be dried using a process that is gentler and kills fewer cells.

Instant yeast tends to be very aggressive/successful so what happens if you use a small amount of instant yeast is you get a slow rise but it's a monoculture microbially speaking versus if you use a typical sourdough starter (called "madre" in Italian baking) there are several strains of bacteria which are about equivalent in terms of how fast they multiply. So the final dough has a more diverse microbiome. The theory is that leads to a more complex taste because of the way the different yeast strains digest the sugars etc and affect the taste of the resulting product.

Definitely agree in regards to sourdough starter vs yeast. Although I thought most Neapolitan pizzerias didn't use sourdough anyways - would love to be wrong about this.

It's called the same thing ("mother") in English, across uses in sourdough starter, kombucha, balsamic vinegar...