Xbox creator Seamus Blackley baked a 4,500-year-old Egyptian sourdough
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
https://www.alieward.com/ologies/gastroegyptology
As fascinating a listen as it is, though, I do find his refusal to share with anyone other than the people currently living in Egypt bizarre and off-putting.
Beats the hell out of most indulgences I see people pursue using the kinds of resources someone like this has access to.
I'm so glad they both said "Yes." They also deserve respect for their dedication to excellence. No, they weren't just dogging him to be mean or something. They share his dedication to excellence.
It's bread, not a gold plated lamborghini.
Most people in developed countries on planet earth today have completely decadent levels of wealth compared to literally billions of the people alive today, much less historic kings and queens. Yet many of us spend far too much time, money and effort on having walk-in closets full of clothes, getting cosmetic surgeries and similar.
I mean the Kardashians basically make millions off of playing to the crowd and sharing their lifestyles of the rich and shameless lives with people who are paying their bills and have zero hope of ever living that way. It is mind boggling and pointless and I am appalled the world is okay with that while also being okay with widespread poverty.
There are some incredibly perverse things going on in the world today and if people like the Kardashians did anything that was one tenth as interesting and useful as this experiment, the world would be a vastly better place. Instead, they sell clothes and makeup as if dressing up like them will make you a millionaire like them instead of just keeping them in comfort.
Edit: which is to say my idea of decadent wealth, connections, etc is different from yours and I'm not apologizing for that and I don't feel compelled to agree with your set point for "decadence." This was like some kind of movie Quest where you gather rare and ancient artifacts to make magic. He literally did that and you're dismissing it as merely bread.
(Also also: How many people could start with an argument on Twitter and end up with "So help me make bread that hasn't been made in 2000 years."? This is "decadent" for reasons having nothing to do with financial cost, though there is real cost involved. Not everyone has a backyard to bury pots in and try to figure out how you bake like they did in ancient Egypt.
Etc.)
It's basically insane. It's not like this was part of some lab project sponsored by government grants. But I heartily approve and I hope the world moves more in this direction.
Not a whole lot of low hanging fruit these days, a lot of it has been picked. The amount of things we 'know' now is staggering, and has built up some boundaries on what's possible or not. Those boundaries might actually be wrong, but the more you learn the more boxed in your mind can get.
Sometimes it takes an outsider that's ignorant of those boundaries to break through them, try the thing that other people just think would be impossible and it works. I wouldn't be surprised if these people didn't even consider it a possibility that you could bake bread from ancient dormant yeast until this amateur Blackley claimed he did it the first time (and was mistaken).
I had no idea yeast could survive in a dormant state for 4,500 years in ceramic pots. I have yeast that doesn't always reactivate that's only a few years old, let alone 4,500 years. It would never even occur to me to even try, as I had a now clearly false belief that yeast doesn't last that long in my head.
I've probably spent most of my life thinking about games in one way or another, and coming up with new game ideas, but even still I never really come up with something truly genre-breaking. And yet board games have done that a few times in recent years, with someone coming up with deckbuilders, another person coming up with the idea of legacy board games, another a hidden traitor mechanic, etc, and creating a whole new genre out of it.
But even then, it's not super common. Most board games coming out now are a mix of established things, with a bit of a twist or an unconventional theme.
As a homebrewer, I've done experiments collecting found yeast and the different strains vary...wildly.
Friendship bread and other hereditary sourdoughs don't last more than a reculture against local wildtypes. Unless they're culturing and preparing the yeast and bacteria by strain and handling this industrially to prevent cross contamination, I don't have any hope they'll be able to do what they claim.
When shaping the dough you need to fold it in a few times and put a lot of tension on the top side before letting it rest (upside down) for the final time
Right before putting it in the oven, it's important to cut it deeply and at an angle with a sharp blade (I use a razor blade)
All that's needed is a self-addressed envelope - https://carlsfriends.net
I like sourdough plenty, but can we revive that?!
From the article:
They’re classified as a sweet onion, and because of their mild flavor (they don’t make your eyes tear up), some folks can eat them like an apple. Most of my customers do.
https://twitter.com/SeamusBlackley/status/125480798709855027...
As far as I know, you are never going to get a big, airy crumb with 100% whole wheat bread. Based on the article, I believe the Emmer flour used is not refined. The bread will always be denser than when using refined flour, but that doesn't mean it didn't rise properly. I bake whole wheat bread (100%) exclusively at home, and the crumb looks exactly like Blackley's.
Even if you type "whole wheat sourdough" into Google images, you'll notice that virtually all of them are only half whole wheat.
What's your point? They didn't bake sourdough. They baked a different bread using an entirely different type of flour. So why are you expecting it to look like modern sourdough? This is a reproduction of an ancient Egyptian bread! And there are plenty of other breads that are even denser than this one (and delicious too, I might add).
I'm not sure this is actually true to the extent it is usually mentioned e.g.
"Yeast grow on grain and arrive with the flour. One gram of flour contains about 13,000 yeast cells. I don’t deny that there are a few yeast in the environment that find their way into the starter, but by and large the yeast that will survive in the starter are the ones that like the menu there, i.e, the ones that have a taste for grain. Sure enough, they’re the ones that were on that grain in the first place. "
http://www.wildyeastblog.com/sourdough-stories-myth/
or more discussion: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/37259/mythbusters-grain-yea...
I'm sure I read about some kind of experiment involving creating a sourdough starter with sanitised air but I can't find it... Does anyone have something more scientific?
And Blackley fantasizes about one day selling ancient Egyptian bread commercially.
So keep your eye out. You may get your wish.
Ed Wood did more or less the same thing in the 90s, it was covered in Nat Geo in Jan 1995. He sells the sourdough culture he got in Egypt.
Ed Wood did more or less the same thing in the 90s, it was covered in Nat Geo in Jan 1995. He sells the sourdough culture he got in Egypt.
> “People assume they were primitive because they didn’t have iPhones,” says Blackley. “They were potentially more sophisticated because of that.”
Didn't Egyptians have tablets? :-)
Couldn't care less. Dr. ...
I guess I’m a soft prescriptivist
Seamus Blackley worked on the hardware team and is primarily remembered for developing the XBox controller. I didn't work with him but I am a former XBox team member.
I'm so glad he's taking a stand against cultural appropriation!
Cultural appropriation would be “posting a shitty, burned, flat loaf saying, ‘Welp I guess this is what the ancient Egyptians had to deal with!’”
adpropriare "to make one's own," from Latin ad "to" (see ad-) + propriare "take as one's own,"
It means that I take something from culture X and pretend that it is from my culture, and/or in some cases twist it so that it makes my culture seem more superior.
That’s literally how new things came to be in every larger culture. Sushi didn’t magically come into existence across all of Japan simultaneously. Rice techniques were continually improved upon and exchanged throughout the hundreds of cultures across Asia.
Welp. It didn't even originate in Japan specifically.
If I take yoga, and call it something else without actually changing the fundamentals and say it is superior, that’s appropriation.
A restaurant was protested for cultural appropriation because the owner was white and it was serving Sonoran recipes under the original name. It was just the fact that a white person was profiting off of that particular subculture that made it appropriation.
Ever think the whole thing is just making a mountain out of a mole hill since it's never the "offended culture" that's ever offended, but some random person in San Fran or Los Angeles without a real job?
Consider white girls at music festivals wearing bindis as a fashion statement. I don't think this fits your definition, but it is a popular example of cultural appropriation.
Ouch.
Cultural appropriation doesn't mean appropriating things from another culture. It's an actual term with a specific meaning.
It means specifically misrepresenting a cultural practice in order to make another culture look inferior. E.g. if you take something that isn't actually anything like what the Egyptians ate and tell everyone how terrible it is, then that would be cultural appropriation. Making bread the way the Egyptians made it would not be cultural appropriation, nor would selling it.
I read the top summary and the overview section, and it still looks to me that yes, it does mean appropriating things from another culture.
Any subtlety I'm missing? Would you take a shot at summarizing the definition you hold?
In most cases, those appropriating other cultures actually love whatever they appropriate. That’s why they copied it in the first place. A lot of the flack for cultural appropriation comes not from that it ridicules other cultures, but rather that the artists/entrepreneurs/etc with visibility tend to be those from the dominant culture. They can profit from the ‘cool’ factor of appropriating other cultures, whereas for those from minorities that are being appropriated it is hard to find a spotlight.
Of course the kind of cultural appropriation that you describe also exists, i.e. wearing a native american headdress to a party or something like this. But that would be a subset and is not the generally used definition.
That's just false. Modern Egyptians are quite clearly and cleanly descended from Bronze Age Egyptians. There's quite a bit of African and Arabic input, but not to the point of the population being unrecognizable.
It's nearly impossible to replace a settled, agricultural population with immigration. There needs to be active, systemic policy of ethnic purge.
It would be a fair point to say they have little to no cultural connection to pre-Islamic Egypt, but bringing genetic into the mix is specious.
https://mobile.twitter.com/bewilderedcopt/status/10817763566...
Looking further up that thread, someone else said:
>And BTW the Coptic Christians in Egypt are the REAL Egyptians not Arab invaders.
>Copts share the same main ancestral component than North African and Middle East populations (dark blue), supporting a common origin with Egypt (or other North African/Middle Eastern populations). They are known to be the most ancient population of Egypt and at k = 4 (Fig.3), they show their own component (dark green) different from the current Egyptian population which is closer to the Arabic population of Qatar.
Regardless, it's heinous to justify a crime like this. It also leaves an extremely bitter taste to come across a museum in Europe with artifacts stolen during some more blatantly colonial period that they forgot to return.
Look at what ISIS did to the pre-Islamic artefacts present in the territory they controlled.
Look what Saddam Hussein did (even with somewhat good intentions) by trying to "modernize" the remains of the Ishtar Gate for the consumption of the local people, while ignoring pleas from archæologists to let them thoroughly review the sites beforehand.
I, for one, am thankful that I can go to the Louvre and learn about our shared ancient history, rather than these artefacts ending up as a paper weight in some oligarch's office, as would have been bound to happen otherwise.
We went to Iran for our holiday and we went to Persepolis and often enough it was mentioned that certain items (small and very big) are not here but you can see them in London or Paris ...
It is quite irritating to be honest traveling from Europe to Iran and realizing how much actually is at home.
Nonetheless, while i think this is not an easy topic, we europen were who traveled there and realized that this thing is actually worth digging out and saving. Before those stones got taken away slowly and steadily.
You have got to be joking.....
It must be that this guy (or his son/daughter) are about to start a 'Ancient Egyptian Bakery' franchise, and needed something to drum up some interest.