Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery
#2Even if some of the yeast is from ancient strains, I wonder if it's really feasible to get a mix that's representative of what was in those containers 4,500 years ago. Shouldn't the population be changed by the selective pressure of being starved and dormant for that long (i.e. the ones that can be revived might be a small minority)? Or for yeast, is chilling for millennia no big deal?
Re: Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery
#3Sounds like the start of a movie I saw years ago. Didn't end well.
Re: Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery
#4Would be fun to taste the bread, especially if they can validate it is ancient yeasts. I know people have brewed beer using ancient yeasts.
Re: Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery
#5Would be fun to taste the bread, especially if they can validate it is ancient yeasts. I know people have brewed beer using ancient yeasts.
wow! do you have any links for the beer brewing?
Re: Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery
#6Would be fun to taste the bread, especially if they can validate it is ancient yeasts. I know people have brewed beer using ancient yeasts.
Not directly related to your comment, but a book I read recently was tangentially related and really interesting "Never Home Alone" [1].
It is basically about all the life around us that we don't notice, from microbes to insects, etc.
He had a section where he talked about the yeast we use for wine production coming originally from wasps who land on the grapes.
And also a section where they had 20 or so bakers from different regions each use the same initial sour dough starter and then agree to feed it for like 6 months or something and at the end they all got together and each baker made a loaf of bread using their sour dough culture. The purpose of the experiment was to see how the local environment affected what grew in the starters and how that would affect taste.
I thought it was a super interesting book.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39088985-never-home-alon...
Re: Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery
#7Even if some of the yeast is from ancient strains, I wonder if it's really feasible to get a mix that's representative of what was in those containers 4,500 years ago. Shouldn't the population be changed by the selective pressure of being starved and dormant for that long (i.e. the ones that can be revived might be a small minority)? Or for yeast, is chilling for millennia no big deal?
The issue with old strains is similar to the whole concept of homeopathy. Sure, the original strain might be 4000 years old, but keeping a sourdough starter usable means keeping it exposed to air where it gathers fresh bacteria, eventually leading to the starter being statistically significant only to the bacteria of the locale, not the source of the starter.
Re: Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery
#8Even if some of the yeast is from ancient strains, I wonder if it's really feasible to get a mix that's representative of what was in those containers 4,500 years ago. Shouldn't the population be changed by the selective pressure of being starved and dormant for that long (i.e. the ones that can be revived might be a small minority)? Or for yeast, is chilling for millennia no big deal?
The issue with old strains is similar to the whole concept of homeopathy. Sure, the original strain might be 4000 years old, but keeping a sourdough starter usable means keeping it exposed to air where it gathers fresh bacteria, eventually leading to the starter being statistically significant only to the bacteria of the locale, not the source of the starter.
I'm confused - yeasts are not bacteria?
Re: Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue with old strains is similar to the whole concept of homeopathy. Sure, the original strain might be 4000 years old, but keeping a sourdough starter usable means keeping it exposed to air where it gathers fresh bacteria, eventually leading to the starter being statistically significant only to the bacteria of the locale, not the source of the starter.
I'm confused - yeasts are not bacteria?
Other bacteria join the party, not just yeast.
[EDIT] which are fungi anyway, incidentally
Re: Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery
#10The author Seamus Blackley is also a co-founder if the XBox amongst other cool things https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Blackley