If 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.
Somewhat 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: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tartine-Bread-Chad-Robertson/dp/0811870413" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Tartine-Bread-Chad-Robertson/dp/08118...</a>. 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.
Past related threads:<p><i>A Conversation with the Team That Made Bread with Ancient Egyptian Yeast</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649495" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649495</a> - Aug 2019 (16 comments)<p><i>Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20624396" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20624396</a> - Aug 2019 (16 comments)
I 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.<p>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.
Are 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.
If this is of interest to you, I recommend looking at Ed Wood:<p><a href="https://sourdo.com/classic-sourdoughs-book/" rel="nofollow">https://sourdo.com/classic-sourdoughs-book/</a><p><a href="https://thechalkboardmag.com/sweet-on-sour-ed-wood-on-the-ancient-art-of-sourdough" rel="nofollow">https://thechalkboardmag.com/sweet-on-sour-ed-wood-on-the-an...</a><p>He was in National Geographic Magazine, January, 1995 discussing this as well. I have two of his cultures for sourdough and they work great!
> 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.<p>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.
If you like this you may enjoy the YouTube channel "Tasting History" <a href="https://youtube.com/c/TastingHistory" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/c/TastingHistory</a>
The posts are from before they lab-tested if it was contaminated; and no news since aug 2019? Likely, it was contaminated and not ancient.<p>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.
I 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.<p>Presumably you'd want to test the active starter to see if the ancient strains of yeast took hold.<p>Edit: nevermind, I missed that the flour was sterilized too.
Fun fact, the author of the thread can be considered the father of XBox <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Blackley" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Blackley</a>