Sourdough Enthusiasts Are Harvesting 4,500-Year-Old Yeast From Museums’ Egyptian Pottery to Make Bread Fit for the Pharaohs

A scientist, an Egyptologist, and a video-game designer are
teaming up to unveil the culinary secrets of ancient Egypt by
extracting traces of 4,500-year-old yeast from ancient pottery and
using it to bake bread. And the results look surprisingly
appetizing.

Seamus Blackley, who created the Xbox, has already made his
first loaf of bread using what he believes to be the ancient
micro-organisms. “The crumb is light and airy,” he wrote on
Twitter. “The aroma and
flavor are incredible. I’m emotional.”

Blackley began baking sourdough bread a few years ago, and was
intrigued to learn that it is the world’s oldest form of bread
making. A self-described Egyptology hobbyist, Blackley is now
hoping to replicate ancient Egyptian baking techniques with the
very yeast cultures that would have been used five millennia
ago.

To do it, he teamed up with University of Iowa
biologist Richard Bowman and University of Queensland
Egyptologist Serena Love, who took samples from objects in the
collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the
Peabody Essex Museum in
Salem, Massachusetts, that would have been used to make bread and
beer in ancient times.

Bowman believes he can capture dormant yeast particles that are
hibernating in the porous clay surfaces and bring them back to life
using a non-invasive sampling technique. “You pump a fluid in
carefully with a syringe and some sterile cotton in contact with
the ceramics. It soaks in and you vacuum it back out,” he told the
London Times.

Bowman and Blackley plan to take additional samples over the
next year to build up a library that will allow them to distinguish
between ancient microorganisms and modern contaminants. Blackley
sent the first batch of samples to Bowman for testing, but couldn’t
resist saving one for himself. The lab still “needs to isolate and
characterize the samples before we know for sure this is real,” he
said, but the successful experiment bodes well for the project’s
long-term prospects.

To make his dough, Blackley used water and unfiltered olive oil
with freshly milled organic barley, Einkorn, and Kamut—ancient
grains that would have been available to the bakers of Egypt’s
Middle Kingdom. “Modern wheat was invented long after these
organisms went to sleep,” he said. “The idea is to make a dough
with identical ingredients to what the yeast ate 4,500 years
ago.”

“This is incredibly exciting. I’m so amazed that it
worked,” Blackley added. “It’s such a magical thing, to think
we can share food in a rather genuine way with our distant
ancestors.”

The project follows the example of a similar experiment
conducted by Israel’s Antiquities Authority and three Israeli
universities that used ancient yeast to create a wheat beer with
six-percent alcohol content. “Aside from the gimmick of
drinking beer from the time of King Pharaoh, this research is
extremely important to the field of experimental archaeology,”
Ronen Hazan, a biologist on the project, told the BBC. “By the way, the beer
isn’t bad.”

The post Sourdough Enthusiasts Are Harvesting 4,500-Year-Old
Yeast From Museums’ Egyptian Pottery to Make Bread Fit for the
Pharaohs appeared first on artnet News.