Baking bread using 4,500 year old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery (2019)
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Some of the descriptions of the food with stories are pretty funny.
> A German landlord evicted a tenant without notice after he opened a can of surströmming in the apartment building’s stairwell. When the landlord was taken to court, the court ruled that the termination was justified when the landlord’s attorney demonstrated their case by opening a can inside the courtroom.
The host was furloughed by the Disney Channel during COVID, so used his time to focus on his side project. An example of COVID's creative destruction.
If we don't see a decade of economic downturn, in 1-2 decades McDonald's may turn into something decently healthy/acceptable, once again in the sense of still being fast food.
We could however see the dystopia of McDonald's only accepting fixed amount of meme doge tokens that go on to hyperinflate, and we'll all be able to shake our fists about how we were promised flying cars but got DogeDonalds
This guy thinks the Big Mac should cost $200
It's remarkable indeed. However, this can be the case only because we don't pay for externalities (including high emissions of CO2, barbaric exploitation of animals). This model isn't sustainable.
I do occasionally like to make longer loaves such as baguettes which aren’t really easy to fit inside of a dutch oven, especially if I am using a forming pan. One method I have used to get good oven spring and a nice crust at home in those cases is to place a large cast iron griddle on the bottom rack of the oven, and a few minutes before baking, placing a pan of water—a square bread pan works great for this—on it and wait for it to come to a visible simmer. The cast iron does a good job of retaining and re-radiating heat quickly after opening the oven, and the pan of water adds enough steam into the baking chamber to help get a good rise during the bake. Bake on a middle rack of the oven and remove the pan of water after 10-12 minutes of baking to finish the bake with a dry oven, and you’ll still end up with good color and a nice, crunchy crust.
This method has worked pretty well in a variety of standard electric home ovens new and old that I’ve used over the years.
And 100% agreed on simple recipes being best! The loaves I’ve made with just flour, water, salt, and yeast have tended to be the crowd-pleasers. Thousands of years of bread and beer being diet staples have definitely made their mark, I suppose.
I generally put the load into the pot on a bit of baking paper (to save my knuckles touching the hot pot) and I put ice cubes into the pot, down the side of the paper so that water doesn’t pool under the dough.
Probably not need to a baker, but if you add a bit of fat (butter or oil) and some honey you can get a thick, dark crust and tasty crust.
Another good tip is to feed your starter with whole wheat or rye flour. It has more nutrition and especially Reye has a lot of natural sugars in it too.
There are a lot of recipes out there obsessing about weights, timings, etc. The important thing to realize is that you need to adjust those numbers to the flour used, the ambient temperature, humidity, the state your starter is in when you start, and probably a dozen other factors. In other words the numbers are not actually that important and you can totally wing it if you know what you are doing.
The importance of measuring is not repeating what the recipe says but doing the same things consistently between bakes and adjusting as you go in a semi data-driven way. In my case, I take 60 grams of starter (which is 50/50 water and flour) and add 70 grams of water and flour to make what is known as a levain (basically a glass of starter that I let ferment on the counter). The rest of the starter is replenished and goes back in the fridge.
The significant thing here is that I end up with a 100 grams of flour and a 100 grams of water. These are just nice numbers to work with when I have to calculate the hydration. That's the only reason for those numbers. Cup measurements are not precise enough, even if you are in the US. Using volumetric measurements for weight has a very high margin of error in a process with a low tolerance for exactly that.
How high you can push your hydration is a function of what flour you use and how much skill you have handling the dough. Too low and you end up with a brick instead of a bread. Too high and you're making focacia instead of a nice puffy bread. This is why you want to get the right flour. It will allow you to push the hydration higher. Also the flavor profile benefits. Good flour makes things easier and tastier.
Hard disagree. Bleached flour is much easier to work with for the home/inexperienced baker. Hydrates easily, dough tends to be less tacky, better volume etc. It's only when you've got the basics down and want to get into the weeds with details that I'd recommend getting into specialty flours that are less likely to be chemically bleached.
At least in the UK, consumer ovens are available (starting at the low-mid end) with water reservoirs and a steam function.
But you don't need that, if you don't have a casserole (aka 'Dutch oven') you can put a tray over the bread, and a container of water underneath. Remove them when you'd remove the casserole lid.
I bake a loaf slightly more often than weekly, and do this occasionally because my casserole isn't large enough, and usually squashes the top flat.
Same here in Norway so I suspect that they must be available all over Europe as they are made by companies like AEG, Miele, and so on. They aren't even desperately expensive any more.
But I bake a loaf in a cast iron casserole at 250 C in a conventional oven. Lid on for the first half hour, take off the lid and bake for a further 15 minutes. Makes a nice crust.
A Conversation with the Team That Made Bread with Ancient Egyptian Yeast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649495 - Aug 2019 (16 comments)
Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20624396 - Aug 2019 (16 comments)
The berries are much larger than wheat, if I recall correctly they called it "pharaoh's wheat" before adopting the Kamut moniker. Nowadays it's mostly a product of Montana- a very different climate from the Nile valley.
https://sourdo.com/classic-sourdoughs-book/
https://thechalkboardmag.com/sweet-on-sour-ed-wood-on-the-an...
He was in National Geographic Magazine, January, 1995 discussing this as well. I have two of his cultures for sourdough and they work great!
So I don't know if that is the case, I just know that the cultures I was given worked incredibly well.
I strongly believe that the flour you feed it changes the culture.
I don’t really look after mine though. I top it up occasionally, and it always works, even after months.
I find it vaguely amusing every time I see an article of book on caring for your starter. It doesn’t need much, and if a few millennia in a dried out pot doesn’t prove that, nothing will.
I wonder if there's an update on how this went, and if they were able to show that this was actually an ancient yeast, not just a modern sourdough starter.
Yeast/bacteria is everywhere. Any flour/grain can be turned into sourdough. The "feeding/culling" process ensures whatever strain is strongest/adapted survives that day.
Presumably you'd want to test the active starter to see if the ancient strains of yeast took hold.
Edit: nevermind, I missed that the flour was sterilized too.
> Update: my wife is decimating the Egyptian bread.
Partnership in a sentence if I've ever heard it.