A loaf of bread is getting a lot of attention online.
Seamus Blackley is a video game developer turned physicist. He’s also a bread baker. And recently, Blackley garnered attention online for baking bread with 4,500-year-old yeast allegedly harvested from Ancient Egyptian pots.
He calls himself an "avid amateur Egyptologist."
"I can read a lot of hieroglyphics,” Blackley said. “So when my brewing friends got some ancient Egyptian yeast samples, I jumped at the chance to bake with them.”
His friends Richard Bowman, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Iowa, and Serena Love, an archaeologist at the University of Queensland in Australia, figured out a way to lift the yeast from the inside of an ancient pot that was used for baking bread and brewing beer. The process left behind the microorganisms that leaven bread.
This was Blackley’s second attempt at making bread with millennia-old yeast. His first attempt was with a sample taken from a different pot earlier this year. But after seeing how popular his first attempt was, Blackley said he decided to make sure that the sample he was using the second time around was the real thing.
With yeast taken from Egyptian pottery at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Blackley set out to get a more controlled extraction. His tweet about the process went viral.
Blackley said he still plans to test the yeast to find out how pure it is, but that it’s an exciting start.
And the taste? Blackley said the bread was richer and sweeter than any other loaf he has baked.
"But,” he added, “I could be completely emotionally invested in this and imagining it."
