Like many of us, Seamus Blackley tweeted a photo of homemade sourdough while stuck at home this weekend. Unlike many of us, however, Blackley is no novice, and this was no online recipe comprised of everyday ingredients. A trained physicist and video game producer credited with inventing the Xbox, Blackley is also an experienced baker and amateur Egyptologist. The recipe came, in part, from ancient hieroglyphs, and the ingredients came, in part, from museum archives. Blackley’s weekend sourdough was the culmination of a year-long passion project that produced a loaf of bread not eaten for millennia. By extracting 4,500-year-old dormant yeast samples from ancient Egyptian baking vessels and reviving them in his home kitchen, Blackley and his collaborators quite literally brought history to life, and ate it.
…Finally, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard’s Peabody Museum relented, allowing Blackley access to their deep troves of ancient Egyptian artifacts. “It was a little intimidating, to be honest”, he says. Bowman’s non-invasive extraction method resembles miniaturized fracking, wherein a portion of ceramic is injected with a nutrient bath before being pulled out through a syringe with the ancient yeast intact.
Blackley shipped the samples to Bowman in Iowa, but took one vial home to Southern California to feed and propagate himself. Interestingly, the sample could only be revived with Emmer flour, a denser varietal of flour likely used by Egyptians of the Old Kingdom…Blackley revived the yeast and baked it on a pan in his conventional home oven, resulting in a loaf that made headlines this past August. “I’ve made a fuck ton of sourdough”, says Blackley, “but this was different.” The ancient loaves were sweeter and chewier than the standard modern sourdough, with a smooth crumb closer to white bread.
…Her work showed that Egyptians placed their dough into a heated, conical, clay pot called a bedja before burying it in a hole surrounded by hot embers, a process Blackley made it his mission to reenact to perfection…He estimates that he cooked about 75 loaves before building his own bedja by hand and digging a hole in his backyard to master underground baking…From the ancient yeast to the underground baking method, Blackley had at long last produced an indisputably ancient loaf with the same rich sweetness as his summer sourdough.