Oh hey, it's your grandfatherly neighbor who secretly waters your plants for you. Ali Ward back with a fresh, hot, steamy, yeasty episode of Ologies. We're all staying in and without hitting up the store for fresh bread. A lot of y'all have been rising the occasion and baking at home, So this past week I hunted down an ologist who can help make your bread troubles toast. I think you're going to low fit, But before that, thank you to all the patrons at patreon dot com slash Ologies for
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recipes because you're gonna want them. Also, thank you to Lutnorse, who left a review four stars saying crude language. This would be a fabulous podcast, but the crude language by the host is a stopper for kids hearing it.
Clean it up.
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Heads up, there are some very enthusiastic curses in this episode.
It's a hell of a ride.
You have no idea what you're in for. Okay, First off, gastro Egyptology. Is this a real word? It is now so as of July twenty eighth, twenty nineteen. More on that story in a bit, But gastro comes from the Greek for stomach and Egypt is it duh? So eating Egypt, getting Egypt in our bellies? So this self proclaimed amateur gastro egyptologist made global headlines last summer. He tweeted about his experiments resurrecting a four thousand year old Egyptian yeast
captured from ancient pottery. Is he a professional baker, Nope, This wacky genius is a true polymath. His accomplishments are varied, they're all astounding. He studied particle physics. He's been a video game producer. He's widely known as the father of the Xbox. That's right, he made the Xbox. He was a Hollywood agent at CIA, representing video game artists, and he's now a tech CEO. He also loves to bake, and I'm going to let him tell the tales of
his international triumphs in the world of yeast starters. So we were introduced via Twitter, and we're only a few towns away, but we socially distanced. We spoke remotely as the La rain drizzled, and I got hungrier every minute. Now, the first half of this episode will make you appreciate bread in ways you never have before, in ways Oprah never has before. It's chewy with him, history and culture and context and a meditative appreciation just for life, no
matter how whack it feels. That is the why. And then the last half of the episode is the how the very delicious diy of bread, How to culture yeast from thin air, naming a starter, how long it takes to make bread, what kind of flower.
To use, what to do if you kill a starter.
How to be a yeast daddy, and the analog chill of taking a grain and letting it fuel you with physicist, video game godfather and amateur gastro egyptologist Seamus Blackley. And when I clicked over to your Twitter profile and saw that you were an amateur gastro egyptologist, I was like, that's an ology.
We're doing this.
So how did you come to call yourself that? By the way, how long have you been owning that as the title?
Well, that was actually suggested by somebody on Twitter who said, you know, gastro egyptology, And so we sort of very politely asked him could we use that to describe this and he said, as long as you make sure as a disclaimer to say that it was suggested sarcastically. So okay, So yes, it was sarcastically suggested. One should never take
it seriously and there you have it. So, you know, I'm an amateur gastro egyptologist, and it may be that there actually are no professional egyptologists yet, but you know, I'm hoping in the future that a huge army of them.
Well I kind.
Of disagree, because you call yourself an amateur, but I feel like if you're the only person in the world who I was doing it at a pretty high level, Like, are you an amateur?
Really? You know, I mean I'm not getting paid for it, that's for sure. So you know, really, if I could get like, you know, a grant or something, I suppose that then I could remove that. But you know, I mean, look, I have a day job. I'm the CEO of this you know, very stealthy text startup, and that's more than a full time job. And so this is the thing
I used to do on Sunday mornings. That's grown like the you know, like the monster out of some nineteen fifties like science fiction movie into you know, a city destroying monster. And you know, I still am not quite sure myself what exactly the hell is going on?
So well, that was my first question for you. In my notes. It just says your.
Backstory, what the fuck, Like, Okay, you're a physicist, but you're also a video game engineer. You're the father of the Xbox, you were an agent at CAAA, Like, what your life? How did you do all of these things? What were you always interested in growing up?
One way to think of it is as you know, a kind of a profound lack of a career, oh, or you know, a profound lack of direction in one's life. That would be the sort of stern uncle way to talk about it. But I think, you know, the other hand of that is just that I'm really interested in basically everything, and so there's some aspect of like doing whatever is in front of you that looks cool.
Do you just when you get into something, are you just so passionate about it you just kind of go down a wormhole?
Yeah? You know, I think that the universe is so magnificently interesting and beautiful and profound, and even the smallest things, there's so much complexity in beauty, and it seems like a crime to ignore it or to walk by it. It really does to me, and so I have this kind of fear of missing out of like everything, and I think that really is a powerful thing for me, you know, just walking around and noticing things. There's just so much beauty. I mean, it's remarkable to me.
Oh you thought this episode was just about bread.
No, buckle up, prepare for some real heartfelt shit. And do you think that partly why you started baking? Was that something where you kind of were slowing down and working with your hands since you work digitally a lot or in tech or when did you kind of get into that that.
Was kind of the idea, right, And that's part of why it's so weird to think, or it was so strange to find myself, you know, you know at Harvard, you know, doing biological sampling of really ancient, like priceless artifacts, when it was supposed to be the relaxing thing I was going to do to get away from research on
you know, Sunday morning. So what does it mean? But I think that that, you know, realistically, and I think it's probably true for everyone that to really reset your mind, to kind of clear your conceptual palate, you have to distract your brain with something else.
I asked if he knew when he first started baking.
Yeah, I can't. I can't remember. My mother was this sort of perennially amateur kind of chef, and she loved cooking and sometimes it was even good, but know, her heart was really in it, and I I started to be interested for reasons I couldn't understand in the baking of bread. And in college and then a graduate school, I would occasionally go through phases where i'd, you know, get it in my mind that I was going to bake some bread and it came out variously good and bad.
Seamus says that he ended up working with someone on an optics job who inherited a wheat field, and the folks on their engineering team would bake sourdough from the family farm grains, and I.
Thought, God, you know, in terms of nerdiness, that's pretty good, and maybe I should learn how to do that. And you know, because it's like it's like, you know what your physics or math or engineering brain does with anything, you know, you look at it and you dissect it, and you want to find its purest part, in its purest form, and you want to find challenge in it and find ways to challenge yourself, you know, I think. And so a lot of engineers and scientists end up
making sourdough because I think a few things. First of all, it's really interesting technically. You know, you have this kind of somewhat random biological sample and it does an amazing thing. You know, it transforms powdered grass seed into the foundation of civilization. Yeah, okay, and that's incredible. But it does it in a really kind of wistful, uncontrollable, kind of knotty way. You know, it's not predictable. You don't know
what's in it. You don't know how it's going to take based on you know, the humidity in the air and the temperature and a million other things that maybe you can control and maybe you can't. The behavior of this stuff is different. But it turns out, and I think this is really lucky for like our species. It turns out that almost any screw up or or half right way to bake natural bread like this, you know, is delicious and nourishing. So your village will survive no
matter how bad you are at it. You might have a lot to do with human beings like being you know, being here, because you can grow this grass which grows easily, okay, and you get the seeds off it, and you can make this food and the grain lasts a long time. You can store the seeds and it lasts for a really long time, and then when you need it, you can kind of grind it up and make this stuff
with it that feeds everybody and people don't die. Like the it turns out to have enough protein and enough amino acids in it, and enough micronutrients and starches and sugar, is all these things that human beings seed. It just turns out to have that. It's kind of miraculous. And you know, when you think about is their life on other planets and in the universe and all that, You know, how lucky do you have to be to find something
like that. And it's got all of additional benefits too, Like I have come to firmly believe that the fact that you can make beer at the same time as making bread is also hugely important in human civilization because all of the people who need to go to all this heavy labor, you know, to farm and to harvest and to winnow and all of that, you can tell them, hey, if you go to all this work so the village survives, will also make some beer. And so it's like the
lubricant that makes all the other hard work happens. So it's really lucky that you can collect out of the air that even if you just leave you know, some of this grass seed around and mix with water, it's going to start bubbling up. And if you kind of you know, freeze those bubbles by putting it in an oven or getting it hot, you get this satisfying, yemmy stuff that stops your kids from dying. You really super lucky.
I'm a really lucky And so I got I started to think about all of that, and I thought, gosh, you know, like a really good interesting challenge would be to figure out if I was, you know, as smart as you know, your average twelve year old in the fourteen hundreds, and I could make you know, bread out of just grass seed or what the new would be. And so I started screwing on with that and collecting yeast, and it turns out that it was really delicious.
He realized that maybe ancient foods weren't gross, Maybe we just lost the skill of cooking the ingredients right. And agrarian society's just side note emerged about ten thousand years ago, and being able to stay in one place and have more reliable food sources is cited as a huge advancement toward the current industrial age. It all because fermented, more aerated bread was fluffier, tastier, and more nutritious. So how do yeasts elevate it? If you will, like.
That the microorganisms that cause bread to rise, that make CO two and also make the alcohols that give it its flavor. You know, they're natural animals. They live on the grain. You know, it's like yeast exists because we started making bread. No, I mean, the yeast has been there for a really long time and it eats the grain.
And when we started to make gruel out of this stuff, the theory goes, the grule started to bubble if you left it out long enough, and if you left it out long enough and you heated it, you would make bread. And if you left out long enough covered the yeast would start to run out of air. And yeast can respiate and feed both aerobically and aerobically, meaning with or
without oxygen. And when it respiates aerobically, it makes CO two, which is the farts that make bubbles and bread and make bread soft.
Smells so good.
When it respiates or when it eats anaerobically it poops out alcohol, which is spear, and so if you leave it covered, then you get a boozy kind of a thing, and that's pretty good. I mean, people definitely would have taken notice of that. I'm drunk. You know, this relationship between humans and fermentation starts, and it's hard to know what those primitive people's thought of it, but they certainly
kept the tradition going. And by the time that cultures like the you know, Egyptian Sumerian cultures show up, they're already from the start experts at brewing and baking. And did you already know a lot of this stuff earlier? Did you always like Egyptology? And how did you partner.
Up with like doctor Serena Loves She's the Egyptologist that helped you actually nab this yeast? Like were you already in the Egyptology scene? Were you like in the group chats, were you hanging out on the Reddit forums?
Oh god, No, all of this replaced like useful knowledge that I used to have that I don't have any Well, I've always been a fan of Egyptology, I mean, like anyone, I mean, how can you not be. It's like dinosaurs, you know, if you don't like it, then something's wrong and we need to take you to see the nice man who's going to ask you questions about your emotions.
Right.
The thing that happened to me was that when I was in college, I had to take a distribution requirement. One of the options that was available was actually Egyptian hieroglyphics, and yeah, it was cool. And the teacher was actually an gypologist at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which is where I ended up doing some sampling last summer. And the final exam for this class was actually going to the museum and translating stuff off of actual objects, which was so cool.
Oh my god.
Well and even cooler than that, And I think this is lost on a lot of people. You can read those words, and you can you can know what's in the minds of our ancestors thousands of years ago.
So what kind of mysteries do you inferral when you translate hieroglyphics? I bet mysterious deep ones, right, Seamus explains.
And the other thing that I think people miss out on is that it's not some sort of weird formal thing like you see in movies. You know, it's a lot of like, hey, so you know, send more set. Sister is dating that the overseer on the work crew, and we know her crew is getting fifty percent more than we are, and we demand that you change that.
Like it's it's stuff like that, or like, you know, so and So's wife is sleeping with like so and so and so I made a wax crocodile in the hope that it would come to life under his bed. You know, like this is and these stories are tremendous
and that you suddenly get to know these people. And they were hilarious, and their language is written down in these hieroglyphs, and some of them are are pictures of things, and so they made puns with them, and they had a certain kind of humor, and they were so smart and so successful. And you know, their civilization lasted five thousand years. I mean, it lasted longer than it's been since it ended. Oh my god, you know, they were extraordinary.
And I came to realize what an extraordinary civilization this wasn't, and yet how close to them we are and how much we owe them.
So Seamus says, he started to realize what a debt we owe to the ancient Egyptians, not just for carbs, but the way that they understood medicine and architecture, and how essentially the Greeks revered them and bit their style, and then the Romans copied the Greeks. So the Egyptians are like your smart friends paper you copied. They were the nerds as well as the hotties and the ones that you should not challenge to a fight.
Ancient Egypt was called Kemy to the Egyptians, and Wassit was the capital, and Wassit is actually the name of the ceremonial mace that the pharaoh would brain his enemy with. Okay, so that's the name of the capital. And you'd go you'd go to Wassit, and the pyramids were there, and they were smooth and white because they were covered in very precisely cut limestone that was actually taken off of them by the Arab invaders who are the modern Egyptians
and used to build Cairo. And so it was fantastically intimidating, and the pharaoh was the ruler of the known world.
I feel like.
Egyptians were like the first Instagram influencers, Like everyone looked up to them, and now that's just you just being so extra, so extra and bread banking.
No, it is totally true. They were. You know that you can look at the temples at Karnak in places and that you see the pharaohs, and it was total instagram. They'd like have huge pictures of themselves and then descriptions of all the stuff that they had done. And this is this famous one. Actually Ramsey's the second, Ramsey's the Great, who is probably the pharaoh from the Bible, and he had he had this big military expedition early in his reign and he got his ass kicked and handed to him.
Right.
But if you look at it, if you look at the the inscription of the picture of this in Karnak, this huge temple complex, like his advertising for himself, what it shows is a series of epic victories, each one just a little bit closer to home. So great, so great.
I love that being a petty bitch has just been like, it's in our DNA, it's who we are. So Seamus got into all this history and a hunger.
Arose learning all of this, which was really news to me because you know, the programmer physicist guy was really powerful and one day a few years ago. I guess less than that. Maybe two years ago. A friend of mine, who I know from the video game industry is a famous beer brewer, sent me a sample of some brewing yeast that had that was purportedly, you know, scraped from some ancient Egyptian pots and various companies brewing companies had made you know, ancient Egyptian beer with this stuff.
But what if you tried baking with it? Wait, stupid question. Can you bake with beer YaST? Oh?
Yeah, it's all the same, it's all the same stuff. Yeah. No, that beer and bread are really the right and left hand of the same thing. Okay, they really are. Like I said before, you know, just in one case, you know, in bread, you introduced a lot of air into the dough and it doesn't You don't and you don't take that long. You take maybe you know, half a day or eighteen hours if you're really crazy and trying to get really sour sourda. So you don't give the yeast
really a lot of time to respiate anaerobically. So that doesn't make a lot of alcohol, but it makes a lot of CO two, which is what you want to leaven the bread, right, when you make beer, you seal it up and you get the yeast to make alcohol.
Okay, and just a quick side note if you missed the Zimology episode on fermentation and beer. Yeasts are a fungus and they're single celled, and humans have been using them in food and drinks for thousands of years, starting in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. So you can see them under a microscope under four hundred times
the power. But it wasn't until eighteen fifty seven when microbiologist and Frenchman and father of the rabies vaccine, Louis Pastor figured out that it was yeast and not just chemistry that made bread rise and beer bubble up.
Eighteen fifty seven, that's when they figured it out.
Now there's pretty much one common yeast used in baking and brewing with a ton of different strains, although there are a handful of other yeasts that do that work too. For thousands of years, bread was just made with whatever yeasts were naturally present, and these little critters had more time to break down the grains and then rise up the dough.
There wasn't any Fleischman's yeast in the Old Kingdom you know, you didn't go to the supermarket and get your yeast out of the fridge. You collected it out of the air, or you know, it came in with your flower and or most likely you know, you were taking some of your old dough or some of the some of the yeast froth that develops on the top of beer and using that.
And so this friend of yours is like, yo, I got to hook up some beer.
So I get this old yeast and I bake with it, because you know, it's right in line with everything I love. It's a gyptology and all this, and I think to myself, this is fantastic. Like now, in addition to knowing the minds of these people, maybe we could share a meal with them. That would be tremendous, you know, you know, what would this be like? And so you sent research into what the grains were a little bit, and I
baked this bread. And you know, I had been posting photographs of my you know, my medieval baking adventures of like trying to collect yeast out of the air in
different places and use different grains. And I had started sort of milling some old grains, like milling rye, like the Central Europeans and trying to make you know, medieval peasant bread basically, And so I applied that technique to this Egyptian yeast and put pictures up and you know, I was used to, you know, getting a couple hundred likes or something, right, and like suddenly there were like millions of people watching us, right, And I was like,
what the hell is going on? And it was really tense too, because I would send pictures like as I was baking during the day on Sunday because it was relaxing, and suddenly this was no longer relaxing. This like super intense because now was oh shit, this has to come out. And so but part of it was that people started asking questions like how do you know this is ancient yeast? Where'd you get this from? Like how do you know you're you're doing this the right way? How did they make?
Yeah?
And I don't have any answers. And worst of all, my wife said, yeah, well you know they have a point. Oh cool. I found the most vocal critics, two of whom were doctor Serena Love and Rich Bowman, who's a microbiologist at the University of Iowa, And I said, all right, So you're right, so how would we fix it? How do you write? And that's where our little product was born.
Well, he certainly leveled up from his sleepy Sunday bred sessions, and Seamus mentioned that there are still DNA and RNA analyzes to do and they're working on it. Given that it's pretty much like a sign hustle passion project.
This is like gentlemanly science in the Victorian sense, right where we may be all professional scientists on other projects, but this is a little self funded project of our own. And so you know, getting DNA analysis of yeast is complex, and we're doing it, and that's just really a disclaimer. What we decided to do was take advantage of a couple of different things that are true about baking and
natural yeast and ancient Egypt. First is that yeast and a lot of the bacteria that make up natural leavening can hibernate, They can go to sleep, they can encapsulate themselves in various and sundry ways and survive almost anything. People have taken yeast strains to space, expose them to vacuum in space, and brought them back to Earth and revive them. Yeast might be able to survive indefinitely long and dry it all the way out and then give it water again and it comes back.
So this dormant state is called que sense and it means essentially to rest or, to snooze. I came across one microbiology paper called sleeping beauty quiescence in Sacromices service CI. But how does it even chill that hard? And how long can it take a fungus nap? Nobody knows.
They may just be immortal, to be honest, and I'm not exaggerating, So that's important to note. The Other thing is that the ancient Egyptians used ceramics kind of like plastic. There's a very technical term Egyptologists use, which is crapwaar, and crapware is the pottery that Egyptians made in huge quantities and would just toss away when it broke and
just make more, because they're constantly making it. And you find piles of this stuff apparently on digs, you know, like the size of houses of just broken pottery, of just a trash heap. If you find little cups for drinking, and you find brewing and baking vessels and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Well, all of the brewing and baking vessels are candidates for us because this was all like terra cotta.
Terra cotta side note is unglazed pottery. It's that ruddy rough stuff.
But it had what's called inclusions, which means basically animal pooh and sand and stuff. And what it meant was that these fired ceramics or porous and liquids could soak
into them. And so the theory is, and I think it's true because we've done experiments on this and seen it, that the microbes that are in beer or baking activity can soak into the ceramic matrix, into the little pores in the middle of the walls of these vessels, right, and they can dry out and then you could throw the vessel away or bury it or whatever, and they're protected. It's like a little time capsule inside the middle of
the pottery. Okay, when people say, oh, you know, we scraped some yeast off of the wall of a bakery or off you off a pot you know, I think you just scraped modern dirt off, especially if it's in a museum. You know, it's whatever dirt it was buried in, and you know, whatever was in the museum for hundreds of years. But inside really you can imagine the sort of porous microstructure of this pottery where the yeast had had seeped in and the bacteria and gone to sleep.
They might still be there. And so rich Bowen's idea was, could we do a kind of microbial fracking on that. Could we use a fluid filled with nutrients and amino acids,
all the stuff that these organisms like. Could we sort of flood a piece of ceramic with that, let it sit for a little while so that things wake up and start to sort of like let go of the surfaces that they're attached to, and then vacuuming them back up again and taking little lab and see if we can revive them a live it's a lie, Okay.
So this pottery is fourth i years old and it was recovered from below a temple and Giza, near the base of the pyramids, and this plucky team of gastro egyptologists were allowed to suck up the yeast from these pieces at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Peabody Museum at Harvard because their collection methods were non invasive, so no scraping, no breaking, and open. They actually do three levels of samplings. This is not for casual hobbyists.
So a lot of thought is put into this. In a very specific type of fluid is used. And when we do this, it's in a jerry sterile as much of a sterile environment as possible, Like I wear steril garb and masks and gloves and I mean stuff that's sucking on normal today. Last summer it was weird to see people dressed like this. Now you see people like that on the street, but.
Fine towny twenty spring fashion.
Yeah. Anyway, so that's how we end up sampling. And that was a protocol developed by Rich and answer to my question of okay, okay, smart guy, you want to tell me I'm doing it wrong, how do we do it right? But that's only half the equation, because the other half is like, how the hell do you get
anybody to let you do this? Yeah? And you know, doctor Love, I mean, she really took a bet on me not being a crazy person, whether on being the right kind of crazy person, I guess, And she put a reputation on the line with with a lot of you know, really important people in the world of a apology that it was okay to talk to us and we wouldn't hurt anything, and this would be interesting.
And what kind of pot exactly? Were you able to get access to a.
Lot of pots?
And you know, the pressure was really on for me because Serena had bet, you know, a lot of her reputation on this, as did Rich, and I would show up like you know, you know, I'm a particle physicist and everything about this to you know, to try to make good on this and then to make sure that the result was treated respectfully and but also get people
excited about digitology. But anyway, that's an aside that the goal was to find the kinds of vessels that would have been infected with the culture, the beer and bread culture, where it would have dried out, so vessels that beer was brewed in, vessels that bread is kneeded in or rows in or where the dough was mixed. And we had a lot of guesses. We even we sampled actually you know, fossilized or preserved or dried out actual ceremonial loaves of bread that had been buried in the Old Kingdom.
We tried a lot of different things. We have you know, a lot of samples. All of them were categorized, you know, by where they were taken, when it was from what the vessel was, which sample it was rich. Then freezes some of each one, so we have a record forever. So that's sitting it like basically, you know, minus eighty
degree centigrade in a freezer in Iowa. And then he would feed some of them and develop them into colonies and select out the east and the bacteria and the things we're obviously modern and get rid of those.
And then there are DNA and RNA extractions and further analysis. So first come the lap coasts, then come the aprons.
And this is the Sunday morning hobby that everyone is looking for. Good Lord, super relaxing, super relaxing, no stress, really inexpensive.
It's really diy exactly totally flying around.
I was thinking, like, you know, learning how to make kombucha or maybe traveling all over the world doing microbial sampling of ancient Egyptian artifacts. One of the two.
Okay, so once you get a few of these sleepy little yeasties, what do you do? How do you make it a thriving, grinding, burping, farting fungus party? Okay, here we go. We have the passion, we have the history, we have the context. So how do you start a starter? How much yeast do you need to make a starter?
Not very much, because what you do is you amplify it. You need not more than a few cells. I mean, that's that's the trick. And those cells are everywhere. I always say, and I've actually considered doing this, that you can probably bake bread using the yeast in the air in your car hires because yeast it's just everywhere. I mean it's on everything everywhere. Oh yeah, the yeast is
just it's everywhere. It's hard to not collect it. And you know, one of the funny things about the pandemic has been apparently it's a shortage of baking yeast.
And you see all these yeah people are saying that.
Yeah, you see all these microbiologists responding on social media like, guys, there's no shortage of yeast. What the hell are you saying? So what you really want to do, what you really need to do is you need to amplify it so that you have you know, enough yeast, like enough you know, hundreds of billion ends of the cells to make a loaf of bread, and you just do that by feeding it and it's actually pretty simple. And again this goes back to like the luck that we have as a
human race, and this is so easy. So you just feed it flour because you want it to eat flour. So you have this jar of stuff and you keep feeding it flour and like pouring half off, and eventually everything that can eat flowers and a die because it's starving, right, and the stuff that can eat flowers going to reproduce and reproduce and reproduce make huges like amazing, like you know, buffet orgy, right, until you have a lot of it in this jar and you're purifying it by doing this.
And that's really what raising a starter culture is.
It's maybe all the ever in your favor.
And I think you should feel vaguely guilty about it when you have your surdough starter.
Frankly, you went like full full hog what do they call that? You went ham on it. And you use like hand churned, hand grained like amorant and old Egyptian grains to do this low right, Yeah, Well.
The Egyptians used a very early wheat, the first cultivated wheat we think called emmer which is also faraoh for bread, and they used barley and iron corn also, but usually just for beer, and those are also both very primitive grains. Like barley is used for like soup. Now pharaoh is like put into warm salads.
Seamus makes a point that emmer or pharaoh and barley, these were like the burliest of grains they built the people that built empires. But you may now recognize it from the menu of a boho chic outdoor wedding reception.
The Roman armies that conquered Europe were fed emmer, and now it's used for warm salads. So that's kind of cool. I'm sure that you know, a huge, like muscle bound centurion would find that amazingly amusing. So you know, we got that stuff, but not only for accuracy, but also you know this microbes have been asleep a very long time. You know, if we actually did get ancient microbes, then they lived and went to sleep before modern wheat had ever been bred. They have no knowledge of it. They
want to eat emmer. And what we found just anecdotally is that you know, this culture that we have, the one that I use actively because you know, we have hundreds of samples but I just use one actively because I sort of stole it around the edge to try out. It doesn't like modern wheat. I took one sample home, I sent the rest to Rich and this one sample I started to kind of raise like a regular sour dough starter, but in a sterile environment, right, like sterilized
all the food and water that it gets. And I use like UV lights and flames and stuff to make sure that didn't getaminated with anything. So it's really just that sample. It's recently actually, I sent some of it back to Rich and he confirmed that I haven't contaminated yet, which is pretty good. Me have a lot of cool
equipment in my kitchen too, which is great. But I when I when I split off some of this stuff and try to feed it like modern wheat or hard red wheat or any of these vrietals that we developed over the past couple thousand years, it doesn't grow very well.
Yeah, no, thank you.
And when I feed a emmer, it's like crazy, it just it loves it. It's what you know, it's it's it's it's it's food. Know, it's it's comfort food. And that's a good sign. That's part of what gives me confidence that we've that we've actually captured some ancient organisms.
Seamus says that sour dough is three ingredients flour, water and salt, and then of course all the little yeasties in the air. Now, the rest, he says, is just technique. Okay, think of it as way. So you can have three balls sitting on a counter. They don't do much, but if you learn to juggle, dang, those three things just became a party. So it's not the objects, it's just what should do with them.
There have been teams who have made ancient bread quote unquote and ancient beer quote unquote, and they say, oh, it's not very good, and ancient people must have had different tastes than it. Oh, you know, Bill, fuck you just bullshit, you know bullshit. No, it's just that you're bad at it. It's that you're a scientist. And you may be a very talented scientist, but you're not a baker.
And if you had a master baker in and that master baker took the time to learn how to do this, that person could probably make really excellent bread using these ingredients and these techniques, just like the people millennia ago did just like in the navy, where the food is the most important part of the morale of the sailor. You know, the food is the most important part of
the morale of these work crews. And all these guns were put up in these temporary towns that were at the base of the pyramids, at the base of the temples they were building, and we find the bakeries there, and the breweries there, and the kitchens and the flophouses where they all slept. And you know they were fed well.
I mean a guy who works out all day moving multi ton blocks of granite, you know, and moving them in the position within like the width of a piece of paper, next to one another, which is how the stones are set in the pyramid, right, those guys had high caloric intake. They needed to be fed really well. And so I think the job of figuring this out is figuring out how do you make bread that would
have satisfied those guys. You know, a guy who could like trivially snap your neck after moving around four ton blocks of grantite all day.
When someone has been hauling tons of huge bricks for lunch, you do not hand them another brick.
You don't do that.
Yeah, and so you you baked it, it came out of the oven. How was it?
It was really good? I mean it was and you know, but again, like I knew it was going to be really good because I could tell that it was going well. I could tell that the starter was doing well, you know, because I had done it all before. It wasn't like a big mysterious reveal like sort of everybody wants to tell a story, you know.
I'm sorry, Yeah, it was a little sweeter, you said on Twitter, was a little sweeter.
Yeah. Well, you know, all sour dough starters taste different if you if you collect them different places. You know, people say, oh, it's the water and all these things. Now it's just it's just like it's just the microbe content, right, and the different species of microbes produce different flavor, and the flour that you use produced a different flavor. It's
not it's not you know, mysterious craziness. And you know I could this culture when I was amplifying it, when I was feeding it the sterilized emmra flower, it smelled really different from my other starters, really really different. It's probably what excited me about it. And when we tried the bread. The bread was had had a different delicate
sweet character. Yeah, it was sweeter, and you know it was it was sour in a more delicate way, and you know, the the the main thing was just that, And I mean the miraculous thing was that it made bread. I mean, it made a really nice loaf of bread. And it was this starter made by sampling a pot.
And you just to understand that we did it in sterile conditions with sterile fluids, and that it was you know, always moved under UV light in sterile conditions and fed sterilized it, so there's nothing in it that didn't come from the inside of that pot at all. And it made bread. You know, that's that's amazing to me. And watching it and doing it yourself and taking the care and ensuring that it's all sterile and then seeing that
happen is extraordinary. So yeah, I mean, the flavor was different and that was really cool, and I was glad for it because it made me feel like maybe we had done something right. The overarching thing for me is a little bit more subtle, and maybe after listening to me talk about all this, this is going to make sense. But for me, the emotional thing wasn't eating the bread
for me. The emotional thing was that, you know, forty five hundred years ago, there was someone who was making this bread, and she had her starter, and it was her whole life, and she was making all these thaves of bread for all these workmen on the Giza plateau, and it was her job in her life, and it was her work. And I got a little bit of her starter, and I got to be there with her baking, and I was with her, and that for me was the most important and most mind blowing thing.
That you have a connection with this person.
Yeah, a real connection.
Not bullshit too, you'll never you'll never meet, but yeah, yeah. Sheemus made the point that the Egyptian culture and religion was based on the idea of eternal life and coming back from periods of dormancy of forced inactivity. So if you're listening to this in your Tuesday's webpants, that might strike a chord.
The symbolism, the idea of resurrecting that and sharing that activity and this basic, most important activity of making food like that is really special, and I think at the end of the day, that might be why people are so interested in this because otherwise it's inexplicable. I mean, you know, watching yeast cultures grow is not possibly the most thrilling thing.
Well, I mean seeing something fart is fun.
Sure, Okay, Now I hadn't thought about that.
That's true.
Starters too, like sourdough starters are really personal to people, like they carry them around in jars, they're named, and you know, I think right now, with this pandemic, we're seeing a ton of people start to bake, and a ton of people start to make their own sourdough, which I'm sure you've noticed. Number one, did you name this sourdough starter? And what makes something a sourdough starter versus another starter? Very stupid question, but you're smart, so I'm asking it.
No, it's okay. So again, like that, you just have to keep in mind our place in history that being able to buy purified yeast for baking that's designed, really genetically designed for baking is a really new thing. It's really only the past one hundred years or so. Prior to that, all bread was made with natural yeast, which
we would call sour dough. So you really don't think about it, like, you know, a sourdough starter is really just a sample of microbial culture, and that culture can eat flour and make gas and leave in your bread.
That's it. So sourdough really is a modern concept, and a lot of the reason we call it sourdough is because there's a specific style of baking with those organisms where you have much longer fermentation or a cooler temperature that brings out more of the lactic acid, which is what the bacteria poop out and causes the bread to be more sour. And that is done both because people prefer that flavor, but also because it makes the bread
last longer because that lactic acid is a preservative. So if you're going to be, you know, selling food to minors, as they did in San Francisco, then having more lactic acid helps the bread to last longerk not go molded.
And that lactic acid tang comes from a lacto bacillis bacteria full name, you're ready for this, Lacto Bacillis San franciscanis God. That's a lot of assays because of San Francisco's sourdough history. Now, I was born there and I grew up in the Bay Area. I never realized literally until this episode. Just how hyperlocal sourdough culture, if you will, was clamchowder served in a bread bowl.
It's a way of life. And if you don't.
Eat the bread bowl, you're actually not allowed back into the city, which is harsh.
But it's fair. Also, what about gluten?
Okay, one percent of folks have Celiac disease, which is an autoimmune disorder that damages a little fingery absorption villae in the intestines, and gluten can trigger all sorts of terrible symptoms. But many more of us may have non Celiac glutens sensitivities or can't break down totally different parts
of wheat like fruit dance. So sourdough starter and long fermentation can help break down some of that gluten, yes, but also the hard to digest fruit tins and polysaccharides, which may be why folks have an easier time eating European made breads because they straight up might have way better yeast starters that break that stuff down. Research is ongoing, but yes, there is gluten and sourdough less than other types of unfermented dose. But if you find that sourdough
doesn't bug your butt like other breads. Gluten may or may not even be the real issue. It could be other stuff in wheat that just needed to be properly broken down before you eat it.
The fact of the matter is that there's a lot of gluten and bread because it's what makes the balloons that the gas fills that causes it to rise. So, you know, saying there's less or more gluten is kind of funny. As a baker, you want more gluten because that's how your bread rises. And if you don't have gluten, then you have to have something else that can make little balloons inside the dough to hold the gas, which is ultimately what makes it makes it bread. Bread is
like it's like it's like it's really like froth farming. Right, you make a foam, right, he rises and it's a foam, and then you freeze that foam in the oven and then you eat it. Really kind of is what the deal is with that? And and so you ask also if I named the culture, and no, I didn't name the Egyptian culture because it doesn't belong to me. It belongs to that baker. And that's a really important thing
to keep in mind. You know, we looted so much stuff out of Egypt in the West and also worldwide. These things belonged to the ancient Egyptians. They made them, and they belonged to them. And this, this this culture is no different. It belongs to that Baker. So my intention is, once we've done our work, to return that to Egypt and to make a strong point about the ownership of that. So that's why I didn't name it.
Seamus thinks people have probably named their starters for centuries, and there's one page on Reddit of just folks sharing their starter names, such as I plucked a few for you, Bradley Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Yeast, Mike Yeast Face, Vincent van do Do and dewe sa channel the name of the subreddit
breddit nice. Now, this tradition in the past may have come from a family necessity rather than a hobby, but you know, in a time of sheltering, of getting out of the store less, being able to make your own fresh food at home feels kind of more important these days.
It's like the difference between somebody naming their yacht and somebody naming their fishing boat. Yeah, you know, one is a lot more serious.
Do you think it's Do you think that people making their own bread is somehow like an attempt to feel more grounded to those times?
I think it's the most human thing you can do. I think that the story of bread and the story of the human race are inextricably LinkedIn and I should I should point out here that that's kind of biased. You know, in Asia it's really the story of rice and rice cultivation. But it's that same deep connection, maybe in a really deep way, in a genetic sense, the idea of bread and the comfort of bread and the baking of bread being the most comforting thing, the most grounding,
homey thing we can do. You know, we evolved with that. It's in us that I think it may be that we have it backwards. It may be that it's inescapable in a crisis that people will start to bake mm hmm.
And if you inspire other people to bake, then it's your fault if they're walking around with named jars.
Yeah, that's been pointed out to me. I've had people on social media who I thought we're joking but are actually angry with me that there's no power, like I like, literally, I was like, oh yeah, ha haha, No, fuck you. It's like, whoa, Okay dude, I just don't think I'm actually responsible.
But okay, well I do have a ton of questions from listeners. Can I just super lightning round, like throw a couple at you?
Yeah? For sure, I'm sorry I talked so long ago.
I love it. Are you kidding? This is my favorite?
After the break how to bake bread and all of your questions. But first, every episode we donate to a cause of the ologists choosing you know that, and with no hesitation, Seamus asked that his go to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. The Boys and Girls Clubs provide a safe haven for more than four million youth, giving them an opportunity to discover their great futures. They have tutoring and mentorship and after school programs, and a donation went to them in Seamus's name. That donation was
made possible by some sponsors of the show. You may hear about now.
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Okay, how to culture a starter and bake some bread? And your questions? The first question was from patron and a mutual beloved friend, Casey Handmer. Seamus worked with his kick ass brilliant wife, doctor Christine Corbett, and Casey is also a genius and an accomplished baker. And I had no idea these two were buds. But Seamus and I off air spun a while just chatting about how wonderful and curious and smart they are. Anyway, Kasey hanmer Ken yeast synthesized vitamins, what's up with that?
I think yeast can actually be made to synthesize almost anything. I've looked at some papers recently, Casey and I will text them to you where people actually have yeast making all sorts of molecules. And there's actually a naturally occurring yeast that makes oil. It makes actually make olefins and even wax. So it's an incredibly versatile life form.
Dang okay.
Side note, I did some digging of my own and for some light bedtime reading, may I suggest the Journal of Microbial Cell Factories March twenty nineteen paper titled increasing Johoba like wax estra production in sacho remics SERAVISI by enhancing very long chain monosaturated fatty acid synthesis.
It's a ripper.
Helen Pang wants to know how does yeast activity correlate to temperature? Like how how fast does sour dough rise at forty degrees versus sixty degrees versus eighty degrees?
That okay, So that's a complicated question, and I will unnecessarily complicate it further. So yeast, like all microbes, operates at a higher rate at a higher temperature. Right up in tell you start to like, you know, shake it apart with heat and it dies. Proofing your bread at higher temperature is going to make it proof faster. It's going to change the way that the water moves around in your dough, and it's going to change some other things about it too, So you got to be careful
not to go really hot all the time. But the flavor profile of the bread also gets changed, specifically with sour dough, because you have a mix of microorganisms, and all of those microorganisms are more or less happy at different temperatures, like bacteria are much happier at lower temperatures. And I mentioned before when we were talking about San Francisco sourdough, that you can make bread more sour by fermenting at a lower temperature for a longer period of time,
and that's because the bacteria are happier there. On the other side, in Egypt, on the Giza Plateau, it's pretty hot during the day. And so one of the things I learned about these these samples that we have from there is that they're really happy working at ninety five or ninety eight degrees like it, and in fat you can get a fairly sour bread at ninety degrees, which I don't find to be the case with other sour dough starters that I have.
And again, a sour dough starter is just water, flour and whatever little single celled friends and lacked Opacilla's bacteria harmoniously chomp and break it down. Baker's yeasts or quick yeasts that you buy in a package work faster, but they may have fewer nutritional and digestive benefits than fermenting your dough and raising a beautiful, burping, sour dough baby that you name like ready White or scoop doggy Dog.
You got to understand that you're the gift that keeps on giving.
Rid Also, Elliott Warren great question said I heard of someone making bread using their vaginal yeast and I thought that was so cool. Maybe not recommended, but super cool, Elliott says, And yes, Elliott, I looked it up for all of us. That is one way to get yeast, and Zoe Stavry, a British blogger, wrote all about it. I followed some links of hers and it led me to getting ric rolled. But I'm never one to give up. I'm never gonna let you down, so I kept searching
and her blog post I finally found it. It said the end product of this experiment was pretty tasty, but the yeast was likely just the stuff that was in the air and in the flower. There are better, maybe less personally invasive ways to procure fresh wild yeast and patrons including Heather moonro TOVERH Henness and his lovely wife Marie Stridam, Veronica, Brandon Lapin, and Carl Corumbo wanted to
know about proper yeast hunting in the wild. Danielle Garrett wants to know first time question ask her how does one know what kind of wild yeast is good for?
What?
Like is the yeast found in certain areas of the wild? And Sam Gordon wants to know do yeast from different locations contribute to the bed, break the bread big time or rise?
Like if you were going to let's.
Say, go out you get a wild hair to get a wild yeast.
What is a good strategy?
Well, if you thinks so, yeah, different yece you collect in different places absolutely taste different and they act different. A lot of questions going in social media right now from close friends of mine. Are you know, oh my god, how long is this going to take? You know? How long should it rise? How long you know is my starter going to take to you know, get over the rubber band that I put around my jar? And the answer is look based on how much water versus flower.
You have, what microbes, you have, what temperature it is, Everything changes, And that's part of the great thing about baking with Sarado is that it's not like a rules based thing. It's the ultimate escape from you know, programming or actuarial work. You don't know. It's one hundred percent field and you just have to watch and smell and listen and learn and practice a lot. And there are a lot of you know, there are a lot of Instagrammers who have like, you know, this is my Sarato starter,
and I'm going to be honest with you. Everyone I know who's a baker knows that they're full of shit. Like they're putting commercial yeast in there and showing a pop up. It's totally clear. Also, there are a lot of bakers out there on Instagram and on Twitter who say, oh, here's my under percent whole wheat, and you're like, that is not one hundred percent whole wheat, Like it has none of the signs of being whole wheat, and you're
full of shit. But we try to be nice, but no, it's you get a different flavor everywhere, and look, there's yeast in the flower that you get because the yeast is living on the grain and the wild on the farm, so you can actually make a good starter in your kitchen. You don't have to, you know, sterilize your flower and then go out in nature and collect it. I do that because I want to get different flavors and characteristics from the yeast that we get in different places. But
you don't have to. If you just want to experiment with a starter, and you don't have to use whole grain, you can use regular white bread flour and you're gonna have a much easier time. And I'd encourage you to
do that. But you know, if you are a freak like me and you go out in the field, you'll get all sorts of different organisms from different places and they'll give you really different flavors in your breads, and it's like super fun and interesting, and it's also you know, it's communing with our ancestors who had no choice, right you can really respect them by trying to see if you can bake like they did, trying to see if you could feed your family with some grass seed and
some water and some salt if you're lucky. And that's really you know, that's that's a cool thing. And again, you know, in this crisis that we have now, I think that you know, we all are drawn are drawn back towards that and I and I think it is important to remember that people endured much bigger challenges than the one we have right now, with much less and did great.
So if you're sad about staying in or annoyed that you're missing Coachella, I get it, But remember we are saving a lot of pain, including our own, by just sheltering a place. You used to have to know CBR or how to work a fire hose in order to save lives. But isn't it cool you can do the same thing just by watching Netflix and eating frozen pizza or baking bread?
But how do you do it?
So many of you patrons wanted to know what are.
The tips for baking? Where do we start? She a little page?
Michael Aguier, Ira Gray Germo, Rihano, Anni Kaloniko, Kim Kelly Samon, Katherine Gilbert, Katie Coast, Kayleie Rohan. First time question askers Rachel Davis and Heather Moore all wanted to know how do we start? Kelly said any tips on homemade bread one could make it home with access to flower, no yeast, and a housemate who will absolutely throw away anything bubbling in a jar, no matter how much promise it holds. Kathy Gilbert wanted to know why the f can't I
cook bread? Fails every time we understand. That's why we're here. If you were going to start, if you're like, this is it? I want to I want to work with my hands. I want to get my mind off of things. I want to bake bread. Where should people start?
Well, there are a lot of resources that if you look on my Twitter page at just seamous Blackley on Twitter, one word I am continuously putting up there a big thread that has a thread on yeast collection with some like you know, jokes of various levels of funny in it. But it has pictures and shows you exactly what it should look like. And it takes about a week and then there's a titorial and then taking that and making your first loaf of bread with it, and a lot
of people have had success doing it. And like I said, there are many resources for this. You can look all over the place and a lot of really great, you know, video pictorial examples of how to do this. You should look for it. It's really not that hard once you get your mind around it. It's like training a dog, and dog trainers always tell you that you're not training the dog, you're training yourself, right, And it's the same thing. It's training yourself to pay attention to what you're doing
and not thinking that. It's like an app and you tell it bread now bread and it does it. That's not how it works. Yeah, Okay, you need to get out of yourself, get out of your fucking head, and get into the dough a little bit, and the reward you're going to get is manyfold.
Okay.
I searched his Twitter and I found this massive thread from June second, twenty nine, and I'm going to read it to you very quickly in an overview. I'm also going to link this in the show notes. Okay, So Seamus wrote, first, you need to have a very active technical term bang in yeast culture ready. We will need one hundred and fifty grams of culture for this loaf.
So put eighty to ninety grams of flour in a bowl, pour twenty grams of your main culture in and mix with enough pure water to get the consistency shown here. Also side note from me, go for pure water or filtered water, or boil your water and let it cool. That way, it doesn't have a bunch of chlorine that kills your yeast. Just saying okay, Seamus says, now wait while you wait, He says, take a moment to get
your shit together. You're going to need three hundred plus grams of filtered water that you let sit for thirty plus minutes, pure sea or mind salt, really good extravergin,
olive oil, and the best flour you can find. Other things need to have ready, he says, an oven that can really get to five hundred degrees fahrenheit or two sixty centigrade, a good kitchen scale, a whisk, a big main bowl, a medium bowl, a baking sheet, some ice cubes, plastic or waxed cloth, and the ability to stay sane while nothing seems to happen.
He says, he.
Shows a picture of what your culture will look like when it's just about ready to go. There's a bubbly surface, looks like jello, and he says, we're ready to begin. Using your scale and being exact as you can, add two hundred and fifty grams of water twenty five grams of oil and one hundred and fifty grams culture to your bowl.
The culture should float, he says.
Now add one hundred grams of the flour. Now whisk everything together until it's smooth. We want a lot of air in the mix for the yeast to respiate. Remember these little dudes gotta breathe. Next, he says, add the remaining four hundred grams of flour to make a total of five hundred. Mix it around. There are pictures of the consistency, he says. If it's too dry, add a little water and need it too wet. Use some flour should be just on the edge of sticky, but not
actually coming off of anything. Now cover it and wait for half an hour. What's happening, he says, is that water is moving around and filling all the flour, dragging the yeast along with it.
He says.
Next, we either a die of boredom or prepare the bowl for the next step. He shows some nee eating tips folding some salt into the dough. He says, to recap mix all the stuff together. Wait like an abandoned dog, kneed in the salt. Wait like an unwonted lover. Do the foldy thing, wait, foldy, wait some more foldy nearly
perish from on Wii. He goes on to detail how to continue to let it rise acute pretty slice in it, tossing it in a five hundred gree oven for ten minutes, then putting in some ice cubes, lowering the heat and letting it continue to cook and become bread. Anyway, that is an overview. If you go to alleywar dot com slash ologies slash gastro Egyptology, I will link this particular Twitter thread. There's so many photos, so many videos, and just follow Seamus Blackley while you're there for all of
your bread inspiration needs. Rachel Davis has a first time, first time question asking her She says, what's the best type of pan to bake bread? In?
Glass? Metal, ceramic? Does it matter with bread?
Apparently not? If you don't, i'st anything you want to, you know, Rachel, it's a good question. And hey, but you know people have maked bread in literally everything. You know, Hobos make bread on railroad tracks, as Casey knows, the Australians have damper bread, which is made on a hot plate. The Egyptians baked with no ovens in pots that they buried in a hole with embers in them. You can
bake probably in anything. If you're starting out as a baker and you're doing your oven, the easiest thing to do is to bake inside a Dutch oven inside your oven or any kind of like you know, stoneware or metal pot. If you're an inexperienced baker, it helps you to get really nice looking loves because it keeps all the moisture around the bread and moisture inside the oven. Believe it or not, is really helps the bread to stay elastic as it bakes and as it expands in
the oven. And you probably see these videos of like bread baking in the oven. That's so amazing.
This is the joy for me.
I love bread. If you have a container and a container inside your oven, it really helps with that. So you can look up Dutch oven. Dutch oven bread baking is a really great way to start.
If you're like a Dutch oven. Are we talking about farting again, No, ma'am, we're not so. A Dutch oven is like a cast iron pot with a lid, and the benefit to starting off baking your bread in a sealed pot is that it traps the steam from the dough and it gives your sour dough a good rise and a shiny crust. So if you have an oven safe pot with a lid, look into baking times without action. Oh and speaking of upper crust, Riley Clinging Smith wants to know why do people make slits at the top
of lobes before baking them. Is it decorative or functional? When did it start? How long have people been doing it as art too? I know I've seen some like beautiful spiral slits. What's going on with that?
It's like all good engineering, it's both decorative and also functional.
So when when you put bread in the oven, as I said before, bread is like a foam, you know, you're really like, you know, you're like froth farming, and all the microbes in the bread, whether it's commercially East or wild east or anything, have farted out co two into the dough, and the gluten in the dough or if you're making gluten free you know your xanthum gum or whatever you're using to give it elasticity, what you're really doing is making a ton of little balloons inside
the dough and they're filling with the gas that the microbes are are pooping out or farting out, and this causes the bread to rise, and it's kind of cool because it rises everywhere at the same time at the same rate. This, by the way, is exactly analogous to the way that the universe expanded. But I don't want to digress now, Okay, when you make, what you're really doing is you're trying to freeze that into into positions
so that you have like a solid object. Now, because the dough is obviously like all squishy when it's when it's rising and when you put it in the oven, it comes down and it's solid. But in the oven, when the when that CO two heats up, it expands. Okay, everybody in high school should have learned the ideal gas lot PV equals n our team. What it basically said as all things being equal, if you heat up a gas, it expands. And that's what happens to the little pockets
of CO two of yeast farts inside your dough. They all expand, and so that the loaf expands and pops up inside the oven. And what will happen if you don't have places that you've slashed on the surface of the bread for that expansion to take place, is that your your loaf is going to rip open, and that's cool, that's cool and kind of free jazz, you know, and
it's like, you know, it's going to be weird. But if you want to control that and have it look you know, sort of professional and adult and all that, people have developed, you know, you know, really sophisticated ways to introduce faults basically fault lines on the surface of the bread so that it splits open in a predictable way. And so that's what people are really doing. And if you if you get a lot of practice with it, then you can control how it opens up and make
you know, really beautiful designs. But you know, at its most fundamental level, if you don't want the thing ripped open, and also, to be honest, if you want the bread to have really good texture, if you want the crumb to be nice, you want to make sure to relieve that stress so that all the bubbles can continue to expand, because if in part of your loaf they can't expand like they want because they're constricted, then you're going to have dense bread there and you don't want you don't
want dense bread, so you want to relieve that stress. So that's basically the deal. And learning to do that slashing and learning how to make your dough so that the outer layer when you're ready to put it in the oven, is a little bit drier than the inside so that it takes those slash marks in a way that you can control better. Is part of the skill of learning how to make really good bread.
So those bread slashes side note are called scoring. And Shamus has some guidelines for how many to do. Essentially, make your decorative gashes add up to the length of the loaf total to give some expanding room as it cooks, and he makes says about a quarter inch to a half an inch deep and with a razor blade, but likely a knife or a very long toenail will probably do. I don't know your situation, Ezrae wants to know. Can you need bread dough too much? Or is it better to overneaed or underneath.
It is that's an interesting question. So you know, it's hard to imagine over kneading bread. Usually when people get really tense about kneading bread, they're really what they're really doing is getting something else wrong. What you're doing when you're kneading is your aligning all of these like crazy long chains of molecules protein molecules inside of the bread
so that they form better gas pockets. And so you're making it so that when the microbes, you know, fart out their gas, it stays around in the bread as opposed to just like venting off and then your.
Bread doesn't rise.
So you can actually have a ton of microbes like happily living and farting in a loaf. And if you don't have enough gluten, I don't have something in there that can make balloons, then all that CO two is just going to float away and you're gonna have a hockey puck. And so you know what you're doing in you're kneeding is you're you're trying to set that gluten up and distribute it so that it naturally forms bubbles.
Listen, because this is the analogy that we all need.
It's no different than if you remember when you're learning how to blow bubbles with a gum. There's a like super specific way that you need to learn how to like form it so that it's in the right kind of a sheet and it's the right thickness and then
you blow on it makes a bubble. Kneading is essentially exactly like chewing that bubble gum, and there's not you don't have to need in the sort of conventional sense or in a bread machine, you know, a very effective technique, especially with the more you know, cranky grains that have less gluten, so it's really it's harder to get those bubbles to form. Is a technique of stretching. Some people
call it no kneed bread. In fact, you have to need the no need bread once you're just doing you're stretching it, and that mechanical motion of these long molecules against each other aligns them and that turns out to be what it takes to make it so that the bubble can form successfully. Now there's way more than you ever wanted to know about that.
That's amazing. It's like, oh, that's why you do it.
Like the science of cooking makes makes it so much easier to adhere to those practices instead of lazily skipping steps.
Yes, that's right.
Human beings hate like being told to do something and not why, like no, you just do this, Yeah, but why, man?
Why I need a reason?
Alex Quinton wants to know why their starter, why their sourdough starter stops growing from day four, Like day three it's beautiful, doubles in size perfect, and then day four stops growing and they say, I feel like I keep doing it wrong, so I dump put in the bin and don't.
Dump it in the band No, So it's a sour dough starter is like having billions of pets and some days they you know, pooh in the living room and that's just how it is. And don't don't you don't you don't throw away your dog because you know he does that, And don't throw away your starter. You know, it goes up and down. And I think that, you know, part of part of the issue here is the you know, Instagram poisoning of people who show these like you know,
banging starters in these jars. And again like you know, anybody who does wild starters and feeds them, you know, grains knows that those pictures of garbage and lies. So don't beat yourself up, you know, just keep feeding it. And a few important things about about starter cultures. First of all, as as the microbes eat the food and they extreete excrete whatever they can excrete. They pooh, it's CO two, latic acid alcohol, you know, whatever it is. It's a big mix of things based on whatever is
in your sample. Just like you wouldn't want to, you know, sleep in your bed, if you pooed in your bed. They don't want to do that. It's not good for them. And so when you pour half off, really pour half off like b you have to be really brutal and you have to replace it with fresh flour and fresh water because the pH changes, you know, the CO two changes the pH and makes it more acidic in there, and that's bad for them. It will cause them to grow more slowly. So you have to be really careful
and replace that quite a bit. And you know, if it's you know, slowing down, you can feed it two or three times a day. It's no big deal and sometimes you won't even see a difference. But you have to understand the microbes are in there, and unless you've killed them with heat or your roommate is a total dick and has like poured bleach in there or something, it's not dead. And believe me, you know, if we can amplify you know, a few east molecules from a
five thousand year old pot into bread. You know you can. There's no way that you've killed all but like two molecules or yeast cells in your starter. So don't don't give up in your starter. Come on, man, have some sympathy. Don't don't be a monster.
And you met, you know, you mentioned the old bread and Obli asked, what are the ancients put.
On their bread?
Like?
Did butter exist? What kind of oils? Did they smear it with the heini yogurt?
Like?
How was it eaten?
And did you adhere that when you first made your ancient loaf? Oh?
Right? So wow? A few things. First, of all fats, so I have I'm the proud owner of a of a vast library of different ancient animal fats. I've tried baking and seasoning pots and using them for all sorts of different things from I know, beef tallow to goose fat to lamb fat, flax oil, all sorts of different plant oil, and they all make good bread. In fact, I have to be honest with you, the pork fat bread is ridiculously awesome.
Real.
Oh yeah, And this was all because you know, we were trying to figure out what fats the might have been around in the Old Kingdom because you know, there wasn't like a recipe. People would have used the fats at hand, and there were a lot of waterfowl used for food in the in the Old Kingdom, and also surprisingly a lot of beef. And so you know, we tried all those things out and they all work and they're they're quite good. The ancient Egyptians also put various
spices into the bread. The bread that I make, I put roasted coriander in because we find that in all the mass spectroscopy studies of Old Kingdom and Gisa bread, it's very common thing for them to add. And when that bread comes out of the oven. And remember that in these cultures people ate bread as a main food stuff. It wasn't like what they had for breakfast, and they weren't making like avocado toast with it. It was their main food stuff. These were peasants, so they eat it
right away. So the loaf didn't last. There wasn't like day old bread, right And when you get this loaf out of the hole in the ground and you take the thing off and you let it cool for a bit, it does not need any topic. It just it doesn't need it, and so it's a satisfying meal in itself. Now that said, the ancient Egyptians ora notorious for eating onions.
In fact, the three things we always see in funere offerings are bread, beer, and onions, which always causes me to think that, like, I don't want to be in a small room with an ancient addition. But I'm guessing that you would have had this bread with coriander in it and some onions fried in duck fat. Got it, And that's and I've done that, and that's really exceptionally good food.
Oh.
Seamus has also stepped up his gastro egyptology game by experimenting cooking the ancient starter dough in these conical vessels in a pit of hot coals to more authentically replicate ancient loaves. And I feel like this is not the work of an amateur. This is a professional gastro egyptologist. But coming up, he puts it all in perspective, so his precision comes from play and from passion. So this should be fun after all, you should like this.
What about the last couple of questions?
I always ask any flimplam that you want to debunk, any myths about bread startering, bread bread starters, sourdough starters that you wish people knew.
Wow, so many, But well, the main thing is just that, you know, this is a very ancient thing and people who knew nothing about biology or the internet could do this better than we ever will. So the key thing about sourdough is to just let the fuck go, stop overthinking it, and just work on it. You know, this is a it's a skill, not a recipe.
That's a good You need bumper stickers, you need to sell merch. I know people want to buy your starter, to your ancient starter, and it's like, uh uh.
Well yeah, there are two reasons for that. The first one is we're in the middle of the research, and the second one is, like I said, it doesn't belong to me.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's beautiful. What is something that annoys you the most about the process of bread making? What's the most irksome? What's the crappiest or the most tedious or vexing element of baking bread or breaking or baking old bread?
You mean, aside from just being me right, Well, so that there are two obvious stands out that the standouts, the first one is that you know, I mill all my own flours, so I have like these bags of grain that show up in my house. And milling flour is hard. It's hard work and it's loud and it makes a mess. Then I have to do it a lot. Second thing is that I'm incredibly careful to maintain the sterility the non contamination of these samples, and so, uh,
you know, feeding my starter takes me half an hour. Uh, and I do it every day, and that's just a lot of time and effort. That is a pain in the ass. And it's part of the reason I apologize to everybody who's that I'm so cranky. And people say, well, how do you know? I heard that sour dough starters get contaminated by the flower that you feed them and
that they change based on it. And I'm like, oh, I just have no patience after spending half an hour with a fucking autoclaven you'vy lights the stereo gloves every day, Like, oh, you shut the fuck up. Read the thread.
Maybe you're just angry.
Could be I could be it. I need some I need some some some onions in goose fat.
Yeah, and what about your favorite thing, your favorite thing about baking, your favorite thing about bread, the thing that gives you the butterflies the most.
Yeah, there was a moment where I was after I had finished milling flour one day, and I have these big sort of outsized jars, Mason jars that I put the milled flour in, and I label them with a date. And you know, after I sterilized flower, I label it sterilized with the date on it because I've got a good lab technique, because I'm a particle physicist and I was trained when like there were machines that could trivially
kill you if you aren't here. And I found myself I'm gonna actually get for clempt to this by one day I did, like six weeks ago. I finished milling and I was writing emmer on the jar and I looked over and I realized that I had written it in hieroglyphs and I didn't even know.
Oh my god.
And I felt like I felt like I was there. I felt like I was I felt like I was a worthy human being. I was. I was communing with my elders, my ancestors. It was really special.
Wow.
Shoot, I was tearing up too, Okay, I'm going to use my all my tears to make a sour dough starter.
There you go, that's right, raised on the tears of podcast hosts.
No, it's really that's really special. That's really amazing.
I want to look up how how that's actually written in hieroglyphs. That's really really interesting.
The word is bettett.
I looked up the hieroglyph for emmer wheat, and it looks like a foot, a hand, a loaf, and a little shaft of wheat. And it's just amazing to think of how many people, over how many years have seen and read that.
You got all this garbage about the Pyramids being built by aliens and mysterious technologies and all this, and and you know, there's a there's a there's a quarry where stone was taken for the for the pyramids, and in one corner of it you can you can go and I don't know if you can see this or not,
but I've seen pictures of it. There's a little drawing that one of the stonemason's made of his friend, and and it's this picture of a guy holding holding a chisel with a hammer, and and he's got kind of a big Nose and over it is written Big Nose, And isn't it Isn't it so much more impressive that those incredible structures were built by Big Nose and his friends than it is than it is by aliens? But isn't it? Just isn't that enough? Isn't it enough that
they were able to do that? Why? Why do we need aliens?
I think what you're doing of getting people interested in the history and the culture of it and the people and slowing down and trying to do it themselves. I think that's really cool. I mean, in a time like this that sucks. I mean, it's it's great that you're doing this. There's a lot of people that will have so much more appreciation. So whow that a particle physicist and a guy who designed the Xbox would be the one in a crisis to help us slow down and
relax and stay inside and get back to basics. The simulation, Man, it throws us some curveballs, doesn't it.
Do you want to know? Like a weird truly weird, like uh like conspiracy theory kind of thing that's right in front of our faces. But that's so fucking weird At the same time that it's too weird to even think about.
No, what is it?
If you go look at the Xbox logo? Okay, it's a loaf of bread. No, I'm telling you go look at it. It's a fucking soured loaf.
Who designed that?
Was that? You?
So the original logo for the for our for the first one was different from that. This is what they came up with after I left.
Ah, it's a bull.
It's a fucking bull. It's crazy, isn't that insane? So that so that's a little creepy, that's a that's a little mysterious.
And you know that's a little bearn stain bears just.
A little bit. Yeah, that's a little bit x files right there.
So ask smart people stupid questions. Ask sweet people sour dough questions because they have knowledge to spare and bread is tasty. We're all in this together to stay in and smooth down and maybe reframe and tell the people we love that we love them, that we loaf them. You can follow Seamus Blackley on Twitter there's a link in the show notes, and also follow egyptologists doctor Serena
Love and Richard Bowman, the microbiologist. They're also linked Kieran Danacci came up with the word gastro Egyptology.
Thank you for that.
We are at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Ali Ward with one l on both and a ton of links, including to Seamus's threads, are up at aliyward dot com slash ologies slash gastro Egyptology and bleeped episodes and transcripts are up at aliward dot com slash Ologies dash extras link in the show notes.
Thank you too.
Professional transcriptionist Emily White and her army of volunteers in the Ologies Transcribers Facebook group.
I see you, I love you all.
Thank you for what you do. Ology's merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch sisters who hosts the comedy podcast You are That for managing that. Thank you Aaron Talbert for wrangling the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to each and every patron for submitting questions and being just the anchor of the show. Thank you to Travis and Miles. Congrats on your new sourdough starter. I want to hear what it's named.
Happy birthday to my niece Olivia and my good pal Colleen flanagain. Assistant editing was done by the wonderful Jared Sleeper, who does quarantine calistenics every day at noon Pacific time, sometimes in character in a red long John onesie and a floppy hat, calling himself an old timey gold prospector by the name of Antoine Calvin de Boovie who's avenging his nemesis Silvertongue Jack for stealing his biscuits and bacon workouts in those themes. Those are up on his Instagram.
Jared Dash Sleeper get into it, and of course thank you to lead editor and host of the kiddie themed per cast and the dino themed Sea Jurassic Right, stephen Ry Morris.
We couldn't do it without you.
I'm sorry. Theme song was written by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands and if you listen to the end, you know I tell you a secret. And this week I was very excited to interview Seamus and a total.
Boyfriend, Jarrett.
I was like, I'm talking to the sourdough expert. He also invented the Nintendo PS four. He thought I was joking and I wasn't, and he paused and Jarrett got on his discord chat with his gamer dude friends and told them what I had said, and then I heard them all laugh on speakerphone, and they continued to roast me, just ruthlessly, and I deserve it. So apparently Xbox is not a Nintendo or a PS four. I was just thrown around words. I don't know the difference. Now I do,
but yes, look it up. The Xbox logo very much looks like a sour dough goosebumps.
All right, I bought to go.
Stay safe.
You're doing great out there, okay. Packidermatology, hobiology for dose, zoology, lithology, zoology, meteorology, seratology, thepology, ceiology, semology.
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