A Physicist Baked Bread Using 4,500-Year-Old Yeast From Ancient Egypt
Since ancient times, bread has been a staple in the diets of many cultures around the world. Back then, bread was very different from the sliced loaves we buy at the grocery store.
Between then and now, yeast has gone through many changes. Strains from all over the globe have combined with one another and picked up mutations along the way.
In 2019, a physicist named Seamus Blackley, better known as the man who invented the Xbox, used 4,500-year-old yeast to bake some bread. The yeast he used was held in ancient Egyptian pottery at the Peabody Essex Museum in Cambridge.
Blackley partnered up with a couple of experts to obtain the yeast. They injected a nutrient solution into the yeast to reawaken it, collected samples, and shipped most of it off to a laboratory.
Then, the yeast would undergo genetic testing to determine if it is authentic or contaminated with modern microbes. Blackley kept a sample for himself so he could get started on his baking project.
For a week, he cultivated the yeast using unfiltered olive oil, hand-milled barley, and einkorn, one of the earliest forms of wheat.
Once he had a starter, he mixed it with barley, einkorn, and kamut, all ingredients that would have been available to an ancient Egyptian baker.
As the bread baked, he noted that the scent was sweeter and much richer than the sourdough we are used to today. Blackley and his wife even enjoyed some for breakfast.
“The crumb is light and airy, especially for a 100 percent ancient grain loaf. The aroma and flavor are incredible. I’m emotional. This is incredibly exciting, and I’m so amazed that it worked,” wrote Blackley on social media.
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According to Blackley, the baking experiment was just for practice, as he is certain that some modern yeast contaminated the sample.
He hopes to make another attempt with a purer strain of Old Kingdom yeast and a clay baking pit like the ones that were used by ancient Egyptians.
Researchers also plan to gather yeast from the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, each separated by 500 to 700 years, to see if and how yeast has changed over time.
The baking experiment has given us a taste of what daily life was like back then, allowing us a deeper connection to past cultures.
There is even a drink to go along with the ancient bread. In 2018, a team from the British Museum figured out how to brew beer using ancient Egyptian techniques, which resulted in suds similar to white wine. Humans began making versions of bread as early as 30,000 years ago, but they didn’t start using yeast to produce beer and wine until about 6,000 years ago.
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