What does “levure chimique” mean in a French recipe?
Biscuits à la semoule et noix de coco faciles
A2 French listening practice · Belgian French · Curated for beginners
French calls baking powder la levure chimique, “chemical yeast” — alarming wording for what is just bicarbonate of soda plus an acid. Nothing in it is alive. Real yeast is la levure de boulanger, the living organism bread needs. One reacts the instant it meets moisture; the other wants hours to rise. Grabbing the wrong sachet is a classic French-recipe disaster.
Sachets come in fixed sizes, usually seven to eleven grams, which is why recipes say un sachet de levure and leave it at that. These semolina-and-coconut biscuits call for un sachet de levure chimique de 7 grammes, alongside two other supermarket staples worth knowing by name: le sucre glace (icing sugar, powdered sugar — not “glazed sugar”) and le papier sulfurisé (baking parchment).
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Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · Lexique 3.83 (spoken). Buckets approximate; exact ranks not stored.