It’s not easy finding all the right ingredients for gluten-free baking, or even, baking in general. Living in China makes it even more difficult! Import stores usually carry most items but they are very expensive. If you know enough Chinese, you can find some local brands at local supermarkets for a fraction of the import store prices. I’ve been sharing my findings on this blog, labeled under the Where to Buy category.

For Gluten-free bread recipes, the ones that use yeast taste better than the ones that don’t use yeast. Red Star active dry yeast at City Shop and Pines cost around 10 RMB ($1.50 USD) per individual packet (good for 2 loaves of bread)!

I found a Chinese brand active yeast, Yanshan, to work quite well for my gluten-free bread recipe. A package of Yanshan yeast comes with about 10 individual packets (18g per packet). Each packet contains about 2 tablespoons of yeast, good for making 4 loaves of bread. I can’t remember the exact price, but the entire package of 10 packets was no more than 10 RMB! That’s 10 RMB for 40 loaves of bread as opposed to 10 RMB for two loaves of bread! What a bargain!

You can find Yanshan active dry yeast at Carrefour, in the aisle that sells various types of flours. The Chinese characters for active dry yeast is 即发干酵母. In case your computer / browser does not read Chinese encoding, here’s a gif image of the Chinese characters.