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Baking bread using 4,500 year old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery (2019)
- cabaalis 5y agoIf you like this you may enjoy the YouTube channel "Tasting History" https://youtube.com/c/TastingHistory https://youtube.com/c/TastingHistory
- phonypc 5y agoI don't really get the point of the sterilized equipment. Surely if anything is going to contaminate the experiment with modern yeast, it's the freshly milled flour. Presumably you'd want to test the active starter to see if the ancient strains of yeast took hold. Edit: nevermind, I missed that the flour was sterilized too.
- danielvaughn 5y agoIf I ever become wealthy, one of the things I'd love to do is fund a culinary museum. Imagine rotating exhibits where visitors can try samples of historical cuisines from around the world. Of course most of them would be loose approximations of the dishes, and no idea if it's financially viable, but still. It would be a ton of fun.
- whoknowswhat11 5y agoI agree - and might reveal that our diet these days is pretty amazing.
- ctdonath 5y agoSomeone elaborated on the cultural marvel that is the humble American hamburger: that a food made of ground beef, bread, pickle, lettuce, tomato, and a couple sauces - most are rapidly perishable items - can be made on demand, year-round, for the incredibly low cost of one dollar is absolutely amazing.
- dylan604 5y agoI would argue that a hamburger costing only $1 is very loosely using the ingredients you think it is.
- hsod 5y agoYou’d be wrong. Ingredient quality wise McDonald’s is fine. The issue is how much oil/salt they use
- dylan604 5y agoYou'd be wrong in assuming I was thinking about McDonalds in the first place. You took it there, not me. There are plenty of other fast food chains with a $1 menu with subpar food. Why are you projecting?
- s5300 5y agoI hate to say this, but McDonalds offerings appear to have gotten somewhat decent as of late, with regards to McDonald's/Fast Food in general. It's still trash... but I think it's closer to real ingredients than it has been for quite some time. If we don't see a decade of economic downturn, in 1-2 decades McDonald's may turn into something decently healthy/acceptable, once again in the sense of still being fast food. We could however see the dystopia of McDonald's only accepting fixed amount of meme doge tokens that go on to hyperinflate, and we'll all be able to shake our fists about how we were promised flying cars but got DogeDonalds
- prpl 5y agoEven better, you can fund one today: https://www.mofad.org/ https://www.mofad.org/
- bcraven 5y agoOr even: https://disgustingfoodmuseum.com/ https://disgustingfoodmuseum.com/
- ginko 5y agoI have to say for Sweden of all countries to open a museum making fun of other culture's cuisines makes me think of "Don't throw bricks when you live in a glass house."
- tpmx 5y agohttps://disgustingfoodmuseum.com/most-disgusting-foods-in-the-world/ https://disgustingfoodmuseum.com/most-disgusting-foods-in-th... includes that one Swedish food you may be thinking of...
- jerrysievert 5y agowow, I'm rather surprised that I've had 4 of these, and have enjoyed them. likely not enough to try the other 21.
- tpmx 5y agoStinky tofu doesn't really belong to that list, I think. It was pretty yummy.
- jerrysievert 5y agoamusingly, stinky tofu wasn't one of the 4 I've had.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
- pstuart 5y agoWere I to become wealthy, I would want to build a "self sufficient" community that fostered art and education, and use that as a template for more of the same. Of course easier said than done, but it damn it would be rewarding.
- tobias__ 5y agoYou might appreciate Tasting History on YouTube which is a channel that covers historical recipes
- yaseer 5y ago+1 for tasting history. The host was furloughed by the Disney Channel during COVID, so used his time to focus on his side project. An example of COVID's creative destruction.
- loonster 5y agoEpcot at Disney World is like that (or at least used to be like that the last time I went 20 years ago).
- kop316 5y agoIf this is of interest to you, I recommend looking at Ed Wood: https://sourdo.com/classic-sourdoughs-book/ https://sourdo.com/classic-sourdoughs-book/ https://thechalkboardmag.com/sweet-on-sour-ed-wood-on-the-ancient-art-of-sourdough https://thechalkboardmag.com/sweet-on-sour-ed-wood-on-the-an... He was in National Geographic Magazine, January, 1995 discussing this as well. I have two of his cultures for sourdough and they work great!
- unclerhemus 5y agoI've read that a sourdough culture is truly a local product in the sense that the community in your jar quickly changes in accordance to the environment it is in (e.g. your kitchen) and what you feed it with. So it does not really matter where you get your initial culture or whether you start one by yourself, as within a week or so of frequent feeding the culture has converged to your very own unique distribution of strains of yeast and bacteria.
- kop316 5y agoI personally tried a few times to jumpstart my own sourdough culture, and it all ended in failure. The cultures I have now have been extremely robust (I have left them alone for 2 months, and in 2 days they are back to live as is nothing happened). So I don't know if that is the case, I just know that the cultures I was given worked incredibly well.
- jnellis 5y agoI don't think this is true. I have a culture that is about three years old. It really hasn't changed. The flavor is the same. If you don't handle your culture with some care to proper food handling safety then you probably will get some funk going but in my experience that funk turns to junk shortly thereafter and you're 'starting' over.
- lostlogin 5y agoMy culture is about 10 years old, split off one of my fathers. Every so often I check his - it looks, smells and tastes different. I strongly believe that the flour you feed it changes the culture. I don’t really look after mine though. I top it up occasionally, and it always works, even after months. I find it vaguely amusing every time I see an article of book on caring for your starter. It doesn’t need much, and if a few millennia in a dried out pot doesn’t prove that, nothing will.
- i_am_proteus 5y agoI appreciate that he used Kamut, which is a trade name for a cereal brought back from Egypt to Montana, United States, by a soldier who was stationed there. The berries are much larger than wheat, if I recall correctly they called it "pharaoh's wheat" before adopting the Kamut moniker. Nowadays it's mostly a product of Montana- a very different climate from the Nile valley.
- boudin 5y agoThe plant itself is called Khorasan Wheat, you can find Khorasan flour that is not branded as Kamut. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khorasan_wheat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khorasan_wheat
- m0zg 5y agoSomewhat unrelated, but my wife has recently found a way to make _awesome_ European (aka actually edible) bread at home, using a very simple recipe. The protip is you need to bake it in a well pre-heated Dutch oven, that's how you get the crust right. Commercial ovens inject steam for the same purpose, but you can't do that at home. Dutch oven apparently simulates the same effect. A $5 loaf of "fancy" bread can be baked at home easily with ~50c worth of ingredients. She used this book to figure this out: https://www.amazon.com/Tartine-Bread-Chad-Robertson/dp/0811870413 https://www.amazon.com/Tartine-Bread-Chad-Robertson/dp/08118.... She tried numerous recipes from it (some of which were ridiculously elaborate), but the simplest and least time consuming one turned out to also be the best, not to mention the most practical on the day-to-day basis.
- th0ma5 5y agoHere is a short video series about the process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0owQi_U44c&list=PLWqTac5vy0cfmXcQgnMAZl6z69kpmUzBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0owQi_U44c&list=PLWqTac5vy0...
- datene 5y agoI started baking bread after coming across this article on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625590 I found it to be a nice, accessible way to get started, with clear and simple instructions. Later on I cultivated a sourdough starter and am using that instead of instant yeast, but still following the same steps. (One learning point that took me too long to realize is that everything becomes much easier if you use high protein flour, more rise. Healthier starter.)
- newman8r 5y ago> We took many samples and will continue to build our sample library over the next year or so. This is important as we need to learn which microorganisms are old and which are modern contaminants. I wonder if there's an update on how this went, and if they were able to show that this was actually an ancient yeast, not just a modern sourdough starter.
- mjklin 5y agoIn-depth interview here: https://www.alieward.com/ologies/gastroegyptology https://www.alieward.com/ologies/gastroegyptology
- wibagusto 5y agoAre you sure environmental yeast didn’t make its way in there? I’d wager you’d have to bake in the laboratory to prevent other yeast from entering the dough. From the photos it’s on some gingham cloth in someone’s yeasty house.
- stathibus 5y agoRTFA
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoPast related threads: A Conversation with the Team That Made Bread with Ancient Egyptian Yeast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649495 - Aug 2019 (16 comments) Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20624396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20624396 - Aug 2019 (16 comments)
- zargon 5y agoSo it's been two years now since this was done. Where can we buy our ancient Egyptian yeast?
- fsloth 5y agoFun fact, the author of the thread can be considered the father of XBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Blackley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Blackley
- yobbo 5y agoThe posts are from before they lab-tested if it was contaminated; and no news since aug 2019? Likely, it was contaminated and not ancient. Yeast/bacteria is everywhere. Any flour/grain can be turned into sourdough. The "feeding/culling" process ensures whatever strain is strongest/adapted survives that day.
- curiousllama 5y ago> I'm Emotional > Update: my wife is decimating the Egyptian bread. Partnership in a sentence if I've ever heard it.
- BTCOG 5y agoWas an improper use of the word decimate, which means to kill 1/10th of an army. He likely meant to use annihilate.
- homo_ergaster 5y agoThat’s a cromulent usage of decimate https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-original-definition-of-decimate https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-original-d...