It’s one thing to eat food that’s a day or two (or three) past its expiration date. But would you trust an ingredient 4,500 years beyond its shelf life?
Physicist, video game designer, and self-described “amateur gastroegyptologist” Seamus Blackley this week baked a loaf of bread using millennia-old yeast collected from Ancient Egyptian pottery.
In a well-documented Twitter thread, Blackley describes the process of capturing “dormant yeasts and bacteria from inside the ceramic pores of ancient pots.”
“We sampled beer- and bread-making objects which had actually been in regular use in the Old Kingdom,” he boasted.
A sample library is important to learn which microorganisms are old and which are modern contaminants, according to Blackley, who swiped a specimen for himself.
In his own mad-scientist kitchen, the bread nerd woke the long-slumbering sample organisms, carefully feeding and culling them for a week before putting them to the test.
The result—scored with the Hieroglyph for “loaf of bread”—was a superb-looking sourdough.
“The aroma and flavor are incredible,” Blackley said (via Seamus Blackley/Twitter)
“The aroma is AMAZING and NEW. It’s much sweeter and more rich than the sourdough we are used to,” Blackley tweeted, adding that the crumb was “light and airy, especially for a 100 percent ancient grain loaf.”
“I’m emotional,” he admitted. “It’s really different, and you can easily tell even if you’re not a bread nerd. This is incredibly exciting, and I’m so amazed that it worked.”
Don’t expect to start seeing Old Kingdom loaves on grocery store shelves any time soon, though.
Blackley makes very clear that “this was just for practice”: Scientists still need to isolate and characterize the samples “before we know for sure this is real.”
He also needs to learn to “actually bake like [the] Egyptians,” he added. “But it’s not a bad start.”
In May, scientists used 5,000-year-old yeast to brew beer.
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Source: https://www.geek.com/news/bread-baked-with-4500-year-old-yeast-tastes-incredible-1798852/?source
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Stephanie Mlot
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