Bread of the Pharaohs: allowing ancient Egyptian yeast to rise again. From the article:

The yeast microbes had been asleep for more than 5,000 years, buried deep in the pores of Egyptian ceramics, by the time Seamus Blackley came along and used them to bake a loaf of bread….

The first step was to extract the yeast without destroying the vessels where it was held. With the help of archaeologist Dr Serena Love, Mr Blackley gained access to the collections of Egyptian beer- and bread-making vessels held in two museums in the US city of Boston.

And he enlisted the help of microbiologist Richard Bowman, a PhD candidate at the University of Iowa, to extract and identify the strains of yeast.

Mr Bowman injected nutrients into the ceramics, feeding the dormant yeasts and extracting the resulting liquid….

Using water, ancient grains and sterilised containers, he cultivated the starter for a week.

In order to get as close as possible to what the Egyptians would have recognised as bread, Mr Blackley fed the yeasts with grain he’d milled himself from barley and einkorn, an early form of wheat domesticated about 10,000 years ago.

“While this culture was sleeping, modern wheat was invented,” Mr Blackley explains. The oldest of the pyramids at Giza was built about 4,500 years ago – by that time, these yeast strains were already about 700 years old….

This loaf was baked in a conventional kitchen oven, but as archaeologist Dr Love explains, the ancient Egyptians actually baked in heated ceramic pots.

In the next stage of the project, she and Mr Blakeley will work with ceramicists to recreate ancient Egyptian-style pots and start baking in them.

The impromptu research team already have permission from one more museum to extract yeast samples and have approached two other collections.

The idea is to collect yeast samples from the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, which are each separated by 500 to 700 years, and bake with all of them.

Mr Bowman will sequence the genomes to track the genetic drift across the centuries….

For his part, Mr Blackley – who has studied hieroglyphs in sufficient depth to be able to translate them – robustly defends ancient Egypt from calumnies upon its cooking methods.

“This was a great civilisation and gastronomic tradition. The Pharaoh was the emperor of all the known earth. Now we can recreate their methods and share bread with them.”

For other articles on Blackley’s bake, see here and here.