Carbonized 1,300-Year-Old Bread Loaves Unearthed in Turkey | Hacker News Reader

Carbonized 1,300-Year-Old Bread Loaves Unearthed in Turkey

ancientist.com

42 pointsilamont15 comments

It’s not just ordinary bread. It looks to be prosphora, or communion bread [1]. In Eastern Orthodox churches communion bread is leavened and it is prepared by hand often by laity [2].

I find it beautiful that such a small but sacred action still looks to be done the same way 1300 years later.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosphora 2: https://www.stdemetriosmi.org/parish-resources/prosphora-bak...

Usually you can freshen up stale bread by putting it in the toaster.

Staling is a transformation in the starch molecules that is reversed by heat.

A good way to freshen up stale bread without toasting it is to steam it.

If it doesn't need moisture, a few seconds in the microwave oven does the job.

My favorite method: spritz with water on both sides. A few seconds in the microwave. Then a minute or two in the toaster. Even very stale bread is as good as new.

Would this have been done using a pan with a reversed pattern or hand skills?

A pan, the dough would not hold such detail through baking if done by hand.

It would likely have been done using a mold similar to the ones in this article about Roman breadmaking in Pompeii. [0] This story did make it to HN a couple or three years ago, maybe longer, and has been updated since.

[0]https://tavolamediterranea.com/2018/06/14/baking-bread-roman...

There's some bullshit about no part of the website being reproduced, etc at the bottom of the article but I ignored it since they posted it online where anyone can read it and they mentioned earlier traffic from HN so I'm sure they're totally okay with us abusing their materials, maybe as long as we all purchase something from their shops. /s

"NO PART OF THIS WEB SITE [...] MAY BE REPRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED, COPIED, PLAGIARISED, OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, INCLUDING [...] VERBAL CONVEYANCE"

Imagine asking people not to talk about your work. Astonishing.

Very true. I read all that and suddenly felt obligated to untell my wife about the site. Too bad I told her about it the first time it was mentioned here on HN so that ship already sailed. Best I can do is hope that she has forgotten.

Does this apply to the URL?

Is "carbonised" a euphemism for "overbaked" here?

The entire website seems fake! The quoted archaeologist sounds like GPT.

I noticed that too, but I suspect that people's GPT-meters may be a bit too hair-trigger these days.

Idea for a study: take a bunch of GPT-sounding snippets from a verified pre-LLM corpus, along with an equal number of typical LLM generated ones. Randomize and ask test subjects to tell them apart. I suspect it would be a bloodbath. (Random chance at best, or heavily biased toward false positives.)

Author: https://www.anatolianarchaeology.net/author/oguz/

They may be using AI for some language conversions, but I think they are real.

Somebody tell Seamus Blackley. Maybe there is some salvageable yeast.

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