Found this picture on Wikipedia and it amuses me greatly. 🙃

Weat protein Floor + pea protein + nutritional yeast + water = uncooked/unflavored fake chicken. Just mix in water, kneed, pull it, fold it and repeat many times, then knot it and cook it for 20minutes. Finally let if rest in the fridge overnight. Next day it's basically fake chicken.

I fuckin love nutritional yeast. I put that shit on any rice or noodle dish

Yeah, I'll have to give it another try today. I always thought, you're just supposed to put it into sauces to add umami taste and then I wondered why I wouldn't just use soy sauce for that. 😅

Nutritional yeast on oatmeal -> best

People put this on food? I use in beer to help fermentation. Does it smell cheesy? Kinda. More gross than anything. I wouldn’t put it near a meal.

You're missing out.

Yes it's delicious lol

I love it on popcorn!

Well, nutritional yeast is additionally processed:

When the yeast is ready, it is killed with heat and then harvested, washed, dried and packaged.

So, I don't think, it would taste/smell quite the same.

But what you're perhaps also forgetting, is that yeast is in bread as well. It's killed off by baking in that case (and I do believe you shouldn't eat yeast while it's still alive).

Yeast is ultimately just a fungus, though, so yeah, I'm not surprised that we snack it.

Thank you, but I do understand. Nutritional yeast is used in brewing to help active yeast ferment better. I know a lot about yeast and how it’s used and I’d honestly never consider adding it in this way to my food.

Oh wow, interesting. I guess, because the nutritional yeast would contain all the nutrients that the active yeast needs? Well, aside from sugar...

For what it's worth, apparently the nutritional yeast for direct consumption is also a different strain of yeast specifically bred to taste good.
At least, according to this post: https://homebrew.stackexchange.com/a/11687

Yes, exactly. It will feed the yeast without additional sugars, which would dry out your beer. That’s not to say there aren’t beers made with extra dextrose for that purpose as well.

It makes sense that they would go with a different strain to do these “edible” versions. If you could isolate just that cheesy funk it probably isn’t that bad. I just think of being wrist deep in the stuff and not finding it appealing at all.

Where would I buy this? Not vegan but lactose-intolerant.

Trader Joe's?

I don't know US grocery stores, but well, the Trader Joe's webpage does list it at least: https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/nutritional-yeast-058871

In general, yeah, the vegan aisle is worth checking. It may also be sold as "yeast flakes", and well, the packaging isn't always as spectacular as that of Trader Joe's. 😅

If you do like it, it is one of those foods that people also order in bulk. It can last 2+ years, if stored appropriately.

It's legitimately quite tasty as a seasoning. I eat cheese and I still keep a bottle of it around.

Most mega-marts will have it, it is one of the more common vegan things for a grocery to sell, like Tofu or Liquid Amino's.

I know a lot about yeast and how it’s used

Respectfully, apparently not, since this is an extremely common food additive. In addition to its use in vegan cooking, this class of product is used as a flavour enhancer in all kinds of (not necessarily vegan) commercially prepared foods.

My guess is that it tastes umami, like mushrooms.

Respectfully, I don’t think you can gauge what I know just because I didn’t know yeast nutrient was a vegan food topper. If you followed the comments through you’d see this was a bit of a learning experience for everyone.

I don't see that at all, there's only one other comment of someone who wouldn't know where to buy it. On the other hand, this is a vegan comm so that's not surprising.

https://lemmy.zip/comment/29253037

I wanted to try it, but saw that the ones I can find locally are "fortified" with a bunch of B vitamins and I worry because some B vitamins are detrimental in excessive quantities. I wish I could find non-fortified nutritional yeast.

Edit: I found a non-fortified one that says it's available locally after all, so I'll look for it and try it out.

Hmm, from what I read, it's usually just B12 which is added to nutritional yeast. And Wikipedia says:

As for safety, tolerable upper intake levels (known as ULs) are set for vitamins and minerals when evidence is sufficient. In the case of vitamin B12 there is no UL, as there is no human data for adverse effects from high doses.
[...]
The [European Food Safety Authority] also reviewed the safety question and reached the same conclusion as in the United States—that there was not sufficient evidence to set a UL for vitamin B12.

Also:

Vegan advocacy organizations, among others, recommend that every vegan consume B12 from either fortified foods or supplements.

My doctor told me the same. I actually had my blood checked a while ago and it was so low that I had to inject B12 with syringes. So, I would certainly recommend erring more towards potentially too much B12.

Us not having evidence for overdoses obviously does not mean that we know it to be entirely safe, but:

• our liver is generally quite good at throwing out garbage, and
• well, we do have crystal-clear evidence that too little B12 is bad for you.

So yeah, if you are talking about B12, I can recommend to reconsider. 🥴

Honestly curious,

Veganism: practice of abstaining from the use of animal products and the consumption of animal source foods.

Nutritional Yeast: is a deactivated (i.e., dead) yeast, often a strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, that is sold commercially as a food product.

How does these two terms align?

Yeast is a fungus, not an animal...

Thanks, learning something new. I'm not vegan, so the limit to what is edible is plants and fungi.

Oh, I realize that B12 is an essential supplement for vegans, and even for many non-vegans. The thing is that I don't think that vegans need to supplement any of the other B vitamins, and from what I can tell comparing labels of fortified and non-fortified nutritional yeast, it seems that they do add other B vitamins besides B12 (random fortified label on the left and random non-fortified label on the right, comparing similar quantities of yeast):

Some B vitamins should not be consumed in excessive quantities (mainly B3 and B6, with B9 also having some negative effects). I realize that it might take a larger amount of fortified nutritional yeast than one is likely to consume to exceed the upper limits, but personally, I would rather just avoid it altogether if I don't need it. I avoid B-complex vitamin supplements for the same reason, as those very often have massive amounts of all the B vitamins.

There have also been studies linking excessive vitamins B6 and B12 intake with significantly increased risk for lung cancer, especially men and particularly smokers*:
https://examine.com/faq/do-b-vitamins-increase-the-risk-of-getting-cancer/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8012225/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6642017/

In conclusion, I personally prefer to take a normal, fixed amount of B12 supplement per day, and get my other B vitamins from natural sources.

* For others reading this, please don't take this as a reason to avoid these vitamins, as having too little of them is also bad for you. Moderation is the message here.

Yeah, in very general terms, it's plants and fungi (and minerals, like salt) that you eat when on a vegan diet. So, for the most part, you're abstaining from meat/fish, dairy, eggs, honey and gelatin.

Of course, there's lots of room for interpretation, because you can follow a vegan diet either just for health reasons or for ethical reason, and there's different philosophical viewpoints on those ethics as well.
For example, some folks subscribe to vegan ethics but still keep backyard chickens and eat their eggs, because the end-goal is avoiding animal harm (where reasonably possible) and they feel like they can do that, when they look after the chickens themselves...

Yeah, okay, that makes sense. In case you didn't spot it, the fortified label you posted does literally list those B-vitamins as additional ingredients. 😅

From what I understand, when a food is sold as 'organic' here in the EU, then it is not allowed to be fortified. (I'm not 100% certain, if it's an EU law or a German law.)
Maybe that's also the case where you live..

I did notice that and included it in the screenshot on purpose. 😅

That's interesting about fortified vs. organic. I don't know if there are similar rules in the US. Thanks!