“Unlocking Ancient Secrets: How 4,500-Year-Old Yeast From Egyptian Artifacts Inspired a Revolutionary Bread Creation!”
“The crumb is light and airy, especially for a 100% ancient grain loaf. The aroma and flavor are incredible. I’m emotional,” Blackley tweeted after his successful baking session. “This is incredibly exciting, and I’m so amazed that it worked.”
Of course, replicating the exact kind of bread that the Egyptians used to make thousands of years ago wasn’t easy.
The ingredients and techniques used back then were so different than what we use today. Lucky for Blackley, it just so happens that the techie-slash-scientist loves to bake bread on the side and has been adapting some olden techniques to mimic the bread-baking of ancient Egypt.
But one of his biggest challenges was getting the flavor right. In his tweets, Blackley explained that yeast is what gives bread its flavor. Since the yeast that bakers now use is mostly bioengineered, he’s had to swap it for wild yeast instead.
Seamus Blackley/TwitterBy using ancient yeast in his recipe, Seamus Blackley hoped to replicate the bread made and enjoyed by ancient Egyptians.
But that still wasn’t enough to give his bread that distinctly ancient flavor. To make wild yeast, one has to leave a mixture of flour and water out so that it can collect microbes from its surrounding environment. But, our environment has gone through significant changes since ancient times; modern air microbes are different from ancient microbes, meaning modern yeast is different too, no matter how wild.
So, in order to get his hands on some authentic ancient yeast, Blackley partnered up with microbiologist Richard Bowman of the University of Iowa and archeologist Serena Love of the University of Queensland.
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