Found out ancient Egyptians used yeast from 5,000-year-old pots to bake bread last week

I read about a team that revived yeast from old pottery and made actual edible loaves of bread with it, has anyone else tried tasting history like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

ruby_grant1mo ago

Five thousand year old yeast, and people actually ate the bread? I read that some folks in Massachusetts did a similar thing with beer yeast from a 200 year old shipwreck. I guess when you've been sitting in a clay pot that long, you're either dead or desperate to get to work. Though honestly, I'd be more worried about what else was living in that pot after five millennia. At least the bread probably had a good story to tell over dinner.

james6721mo ago

Fair enough, but I gotta push back a little on that. The yeast was dormant, not sitting there alive and kicking for five thousand years. Dormant is different from dead, and that's a pretty amazing thing. I guess what I'm saying is, @wrenstone, we aren't just throwing away stuff that still has life in it. We're throwing away stuff that had the potential for something, but not the same thing that yeast did for that pot. The yeast was just waiting for the right conditions, not for us to decide it still had value.

wrenstone1mo ago

It's wild how something that old can still be alive and working like that. Kinda makes you think about all the stuff we throw away today that still has life in it. We treat things like they're disposable after a few years, but there's ancient stuff just sitting there waiting to be used again. Maybe we've lost the sense of what actually lasts and what doesn't.