Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's your grandfatherly neighbor who secretly waters your
Speaker 1: plants for you. Ali Ward back with a fresh, hot, steamy,
Speaker 1: yeasty episode of Ologies. We're all staying in and without
Speaker 1: hitting up the store for fresh bread. A lot of
Speaker 1: y'all have been rising the occasion and baking at home,
Speaker 1: So this past week I hunted down an ologist who
Speaker 1: can help make your bread troubles toast. I think you're
Speaker 1: going to low fit, But before that, thank you to
Speaker 1: all the patrons at patreon dot com slash Ologies for
Speaker 1: supporting the show right now. Podcasters are lucky to work
Speaker 1: from their closets, but recording remotely is a giant pain
Speaker 1: in the hot buns and it costs more to deal
Speaker 1: with in post, So thank you for supporting. Patron's Happy
Speaker 1: birthday on April seventeenth to Stephen Ray Morris. Everyone wish
Speaker 1: him a happy one on Friday. Thank you to everyone
Speaker 1: wearing items from Ologiesmarch dot com, every person telling a
Speaker 1: friend or sending an episode around, rating, subscribing, all of
Speaker 1: those are life changers, and of course reviewing on iTunes
Speaker 1: and to honor and embarrass someone each week, I pick
Speaker 1: a fresh one this week. Thank you, AKP, who says
Speaker 1: that they bought an iPad just so they can finally
Speaker 1: give me a review that was way too kind. Also,
Speaker 1: I hope that you use it for pinteresting some bread
Speaker 1: recipes because you're gonna want them. Also, thank you to Lutnorse,
Speaker 1: who left a review four stars saying crude language. This
Speaker 1: would be a fabulous podcast, but the crude language by
Speaker 1: the host is a stopper for kids hearing it.
Speaker 2: Clean it up.
Speaker 1: Thanks Lutnorse, I hear you. And surprise, there are free
Speaker 1: bleeped episodes safe for kids. They've been up there for years.
Speaker 1: There at Alleyward dot com on the ologies extra page.
Speaker 1: It's linked in the show notes.
Speaker 2: Have at it. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Heads up, there are some very enthusiastic curses in this episode.
Speaker 2: It's a hell of a ride.
Speaker 1: You have no idea what you're in for. Okay, First off,
Speaker 1: gastro Egyptology. Is this a real word? It is now
Speaker 1: so as of July twenty eighth, twenty nineteen. More on
Speaker 1: that story in a bit, But gastro comes from the
Speaker 1: Greek for stomach and Egypt is it duh? So eating Egypt,
Speaker 1: getting Egypt in our bellies? So this self proclaimed amateur
Speaker 1: gastro egyptologist made global headlines last summer. He tweeted about
Speaker 1: his experiments resurrecting a four thousand year old Egyptian yeast
Speaker 1: captured from ancient pottery. Is he a professional baker, Nope,
Speaker 1: This wacky genius is a true polymath. His accomplishments are varied,
Speaker 1: they're all astounding. He studied particle physics. He's been a
Speaker 1: video game producer. He's widely known as the father of
Speaker 1: the Xbox. That's right, he made the Xbox. He was
Speaker 1: a Hollywood agent at CIA, representing video game artists, and
Speaker 1: he's now a tech CEO. He also loves to bake,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to let him tell the tales of
Speaker 1: his international triumphs in the world of yeast starters. So
Speaker 1: we were introduced via Twitter, and we're only a few
Speaker 1: towns away, but we socially distanced. We spoke remotely as
Speaker 1: the La rain drizzled, and I got hungrier every minute. Now,
Speaker 1: the first half of this episode will make you appreciate
Speaker 1: bread in ways you never have before, in ways Oprah
Speaker 1: never has before. It's chewy with him, history and culture
Speaker 1: and context and a meditative appreciation just for life, no
Speaker 1: matter how whack it feels. That is the why. And
Speaker 1: then the last half of the episode is the how
Speaker 1: the very delicious diy of bread, How to culture yeast
Speaker 1: from thin air, naming a starter, how long it takes
Speaker 1: to make bread, what kind of flower.
Speaker 2: To use, what to do if you kill a starter.
Speaker 1: How to be a yeast daddy, and the analog chill
Speaker 1: of taking a grain and letting it fuel you with physicist,
Speaker 1: video game godfather and amateur gastro egyptologist Seamus Blackley. And
Speaker 1: when I clicked over to your Twitter profile and saw
Speaker 1: that you were an amateur gastro egyptologist, I was like,
Speaker 1: that's an ology.
Speaker 2: We're doing this.
Speaker 1: So how did you come to call yourself that? By
Speaker 1: the way, how long have you been owning that as
Speaker 1: the title?
Speaker 3: Well, that was actually suggested by somebody on Twitter who said,
Speaker 3: you know, gastro egyptology, And so we sort of very
Speaker 3: politely asked him could we use that to describe this
Speaker 3: and he said, as long as you make sure as
Speaker 3: a disclaimer to say that it was suggested sarcastically. So okay,
Speaker 3: So yes, it was sarcastically suggested. One should never take
Speaker 3: it seriously and there you have it. So, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm an amateur gastro egyptologist, and it may be that
Speaker 3: there actually are no professional egyptologists yet, but you know,
Speaker 3: I'm hoping in the future that a huge army of them.
Speaker 2: Well I kind.
Speaker 1: Of disagree, because you call yourself an amateur, but I
Speaker 1: feel like if you're the only person in the world
Speaker 1: who I was doing it at a pretty high level, Like,
Speaker 1: are you an amateur?
Speaker 3: Really? You know, I mean I'm not getting paid for it,
Speaker 3: that's for sure. So you know, really, if I could
Speaker 3: get like, you know, a grant or something, I suppose
Speaker 3: that then I could remove that. But you know, I mean, look,
Speaker 3: I have a day job. I'm the CEO of this
Speaker 3: you know, very stealthy text startup, and that's more than
Speaker 3: a full time job. And so this is the thing
Speaker 3: I used to do on Sunday mornings. That's grown like
Speaker 3: the you know, like the monster out of some nineteen
Speaker 3: fifties like science fiction movie into you know, a city
Speaker 3: destroying monster. And you know, I still am not quite
Speaker 3: sure myself what exactly the hell is going on?
Speaker 2: So well, that was my first question for you. In
Speaker 2: my notes. It just says your.
Speaker 1: Backstory, what the fuck, Like, Okay, you're a physicist, but
Speaker 1: you're also a video game engineer. You're the father of
Speaker 1: the Xbox, you were an agent at CAAA, Like, what
Speaker 1: your life? How did you do all of these things?
Speaker 1: What were you always interested in growing up?
Speaker 3: One way to think of it is as you know,
Speaker 3: a kind of a profound lack of a career, oh,
Speaker 3: or you know, a profound lack of direction in one's life.
Speaker 3: That would be the sort of stern uncle way to
Speaker 3: talk about it. But I think, you know, the other
Speaker 3: hand of that is just that I'm really interested in
Speaker 3: basically everything, and so there's some aspect of like doing
Speaker 3: whatever is in front of you that looks cool.
Speaker 1: Do you just when you get into something, are you
Speaker 1: just so passionate about it you just kind of go
Speaker 1: down a wormhole?
Speaker 3: Yeah? You know, I think that the universe is so
Speaker 3: magnificently interesting and beautiful and profound, and even the smallest things,
Speaker 3: there's so much complexity in beauty, and it seems like
Speaker 3: a crime to ignore it or to walk by it.
Speaker 3: It really does to me, and so I have this
Speaker 3: kind of fear of missing out of like everything, and
Speaker 3: I think that really is a powerful thing for me,
Speaker 3: you know, just walking around and noticing things. There's just
Speaker 3: so much beauty. I mean, it's remarkable to me.
Speaker 2: Oh you thought this episode was just about bread.
Speaker 1: No, buckle up, prepare for some real heartfelt shit. And
Speaker 1: do you think that partly why you started baking? Was
Speaker 1: that something where you kind of were slowing down and
Speaker 1: working with your hands since you work digitally a lot
Speaker 1: or in tech or when did you kind of get
Speaker 1: into that that.
Speaker 3: Was kind of the idea, right, And that's part of
Speaker 3: why it's so weird to think, or it was so
Speaker 3: strange to find myself, you know, you know at Harvard,
Speaker 3: you know, doing biological sampling of really ancient, like priceless artifacts,
Speaker 3: when it was supposed to be the relaxing thing I
Speaker 3: was going to do to get away from research on
Speaker 3: you know, Sunday morning. So what does it mean? But
Speaker 3: I think that that, you know, realistically, and I think
Speaker 3: it's probably true for everyone that to really reset your mind,
Speaker 3: to kind of clear your conceptual palate, you have to
Speaker 3: distract your brain with something else.
Speaker 1: I asked if he knew when he first started baking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can't. I can't remember. My mother was this
Speaker 3: sort of perennially amateur kind of chef, and she loved
Speaker 3: cooking and sometimes it was even good, but know, her
Speaker 3: heart was really in it, and I I started to
Speaker 3: be interested for reasons I couldn't understand in the baking
Speaker 3: of bread. And in college and then a graduate school,
Speaker 3: I would occasionally go through phases where i'd, you know,
Speaker 3: get it in my mind that I was going to
Speaker 3: bake some bread and it came out variously good and bad.
Speaker 1: Seamus says that he ended up working with someone on
Speaker 1: an optics job who inherited a wheat field, and the
Speaker 1: folks on their engineering team would bake sourdough from the
Speaker 1: family farm grains, and I.
Speaker 3: Thought, God, you know, in terms of nerdiness, that's pretty good,
Speaker 3: and maybe I should learn how to do that. And
Speaker 3: you know, because it's like it's like, you know what
Speaker 3: your physics or math or engineering brain does with anything,
Speaker 3: you know, you look at it and you dissect it,
Speaker 3: and you want to find its purest part, in its
Speaker 3: purest form, and you want to find challenge in it
Speaker 3: and find ways to challenge yourself, you know, I think.
Speaker 3: And so a lot of engineers and scientists end up
Speaker 3: making sourdough because I think a few things. First of all,
Speaker 3: it's really interesting technically. You know, you have this kind
Speaker 3: of somewhat random biological sample and it does an amazing thing.
Speaker 3: You know, it transforms powdered grass seed into the foundation
Speaker 3: of civilization. Yeah, okay, and that's incredible. But it does
Speaker 3: it in a really kind of wistful, uncontrollable, kind of
Speaker 3: knotty way. You know, it's not predictable. You don't know
Speaker 3: what's in it. You don't know how it's going to
Speaker 3: take based on you know, the humidity in the air
Speaker 3: and the temperature and a million other things that maybe
Speaker 3: you can control and maybe you can't. The behavior of
Speaker 3: this stuff is different. But it turns out, and I
Speaker 3: think this is really lucky for like our species. It
Speaker 3: turns out that almost any screw up or or half
Speaker 3: right way to bake natural bread like this, you know,
Speaker 3: is delicious and nourishing. So your village will survive no
Speaker 3: matter how bad you are at it. You might have
Speaker 3: a lot to do with human beings like being you know,
Speaker 3: being here, because you can grow this grass which grows easily, okay,
Speaker 3: and you get the seeds off it, and you can
Speaker 3: make this food and the grain lasts a long time.
Speaker 3: You can store the seeds and it lasts for a
Speaker 3: really long time, and then when you need it, you
Speaker 3: can kind of grind it up and make this stuff
Speaker 3: with it that feeds everybody and people don't die. Like
Speaker 3: the it turns out to have enough protein and enough
Speaker 3: amino acids in it, and enough micronutrients and starches and sugar,
Speaker 3: is all these things that human beings seed. It just
Speaker 3: turns out to have that. It's kind of miraculous. And
Speaker 3: you know, when you think about is their life on
Speaker 3: other planets and in the universe and all that, You know,
Speaker 3: how lucky do you have to be to find something
Speaker 3: like that. And it's got all of additional benefits too,
Speaker 3: Like I have come to firmly believe that the fact
Speaker 3: that you can make beer at the same time as
Speaker 3: making bread is also hugely important in human civilization because
Speaker 3: all of the people who need to go to all
Speaker 3: this heavy labor, you know, to farm and to harvest
Speaker 3: and to winnow and all of that, you can tell them, hey,
Speaker 3: if you go to all this work so the village survives,
Speaker 3: will also make some beer. And so it's like the
Speaker 3: lubricant that makes all the other hard work happens. So
Speaker 3: it's really lucky that you can collect out of the
Speaker 3: air that even if you just leave you know, some
Speaker 3: of this grass seed around and mix with water, it's
Speaker 3: going to start bubbling up. And if you kind of
Speaker 3: you know, freeze those bubbles by putting it in an
Speaker 3: oven or getting it hot, you get this satisfying, yemmy
Speaker 3: stuff that stops your kids from dying. You really super lucky.
Speaker 3: I'm a really lucky And so I got I started
Speaker 3: to think about all of that, and I thought, gosh,
Speaker 3: you know, like a really good interesting challenge would be
Speaker 3: to figure out if I was, you know, as smart
Speaker 3: as you know, your average twelve year old in the
Speaker 3: fourteen hundreds, and I could make you know, bread out
Speaker 3: of just grass seed or what the new would be.
Speaker 3: And so I started screwing on with that and collecting yeast,
Speaker 3: and it turns out that it was really delicious.
Speaker 1: He realized that maybe ancient foods weren't gross, Maybe we
Speaker 1: just lost the skill of cooking the ingredients right. And
Speaker 1: agrarian society's just side note emerged about ten thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: and being able to stay in one place and have
Speaker 1: more reliable food sources is cited as a huge advancement
Speaker 1: toward the current industrial age. It all because fermented, more
Speaker 1: aerated bread was fluffier, tastier, and more nutritious. So how
Speaker 1: do yeasts elevate it? If you will, like.
Speaker 3: That the microorganisms that cause bread to rise, that make
Speaker 3: CO two and also make the alcohols that give it
Speaker 3: its flavor. You know, they're natural animals. They live on
Speaker 3: the grain. You know, it's like yeast exists because we
Speaker 3: started making bread. No, I mean, the yeast has been
Speaker 3: there for a really long time and it eats the grain.
Speaker 3: And when we started to make gruel out of this stuff,
Speaker 3: the theory goes, the grule started to bubble if you
Speaker 3: left it out long enough, and if you left it
Speaker 3: out long enough and you heated it, you would make bread.
Speaker 3: And if you left out long enough covered the yeast
Speaker 3: would start to run out of air. And yeast can
Speaker 3: respiate and feed both aerobically and aerobically, meaning with or
Speaker 3: without oxygen. And when it respiates aerobically, it makes CO two,
Speaker 3: which is the farts that make bubbles and bread and
Speaker 3: make bread soft.
Speaker 2: Smells so good.
Speaker 3: When it respiates or when it eats anaerobically it poops
Speaker 3: out alcohol, which is spear, and so if you leave
Speaker 3: it covered, then you get a boozy kind of a thing,
Speaker 3: and that's pretty good. I mean, people definitely would have
Speaker 3: taken notice of that. I'm drunk. You know, this relationship
Speaker 3: between humans and fermentation starts, and it's hard to know
Speaker 3: what those primitive people's thought of it, but they certainly
Speaker 3: kept the tradition going. And by the time that cultures
Speaker 3: like the you know, Egyptian Sumerian cultures show up, they're
Speaker 3: already from the start experts at brewing and baking. And
Speaker 3: did you already know a lot of this stuff earlier?
Speaker 3: Did you always like Egyptology? And how did you partner.
Speaker 1: Up with like doctor Serena Loves She's the Egyptologist that
Speaker 1: helped you actually nab this yeast? Like were you already
Speaker 1: in the Egyptology scene? Were you like in the group chats,
Speaker 1: were you hanging out on the Reddit forums?
Speaker 3: Oh god, No, all of this replaced like useful knowledge
Speaker 3: that I used to have that I don't have any Well,
Speaker 3: I've always been a fan of Egyptology, I mean, like anyone,
Speaker 3: I mean, how can you not be. It's like dinosaurs,
Speaker 3: you know, if you don't like it, then something's wrong
Speaker 3: and we need to take you to see the nice
Speaker 3: man who's going to ask you questions about your emotions.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: The thing that happened to me was that when I
Speaker 3: was in college, I had to take a distribution requirement.
Speaker 3: One of the options that was available was actually Egyptian hieroglyphics,
Speaker 3: and yeah, it was cool. And the teacher was actually
Speaker 3: an gypologist at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,
Speaker 3: which is where I ended up doing some sampling last summer.
Speaker 3: And the final exam for this class was actually going
Speaker 3: to the museum and translating stuff off of actual objects,
Speaker 3: which was so cool.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: Well and even cooler than that, And I think this
Speaker 3: is lost on a lot of people. You can read
Speaker 3: those words, and you can you can know what's in
Speaker 3: the minds of our ancestors thousands of years ago.
Speaker 1: So what kind of mysteries do you inferral when you
Speaker 1: translate hieroglyphics? I bet mysterious deep ones, right, Seamus explains.
Speaker 3: And the other thing that I think people miss out
Speaker 3: on is that it's not some sort of weird formal
Speaker 3: thing like you see in movies. You know, it's a
Speaker 3: lot of like, hey, so you know, send more set.
Speaker 3: Sister is dating that the overseer on the work crew,
Speaker 3: and we know her crew is getting fifty percent more
Speaker 3: than we are, and we demand that you change that.
Speaker 3: Like it's it's stuff like that, or like, you know,
Speaker 3: so and So's wife is sleeping with like so and
Speaker 3: so and so I made a wax crocodile in the
Speaker 3: hope that it would come to life under his bed.
Speaker 3: You know, like this is and these stories are tremendous
Speaker 3: and that you suddenly get to know these people. And
Speaker 3: they were hilarious, and their language is written down in
Speaker 3: these hieroglyphs, and some of them are are pictures of things,
Speaker 3: and so they made puns with them, and they had
Speaker 3: a certain kind of humor, and they were so smart
Speaker 3: and so successful. And you know, their civilization lasted five
Speaker 3: thousand years. I mean, it lasted longer than it's been
Speaker 3: since it ended. Oh my god, you know, they were extraordinary.
Speaker 3: And I came to realize what an extraordinary civilization this wasn't,
Speaker 3: and yet how close to them we are and how
Speaker 3: much we owe them.
Speaker 1: So Seamus says, he started to realize what a debt
Speaker 1: we owe to the ancient Egyptians, not just for carbs,
Speaker 1: but the way that they understood medicine and architecture, and
Speaker 1: how essentially the Greeks revered them and bit their style,
Speaker 1: and then the Romans copied the Greeks. So the Egyptians
Speaker 1: are like your smart friends paper you copied. They were
Speaker 1: the nerds as well as the hotties and the ones
Speaker 1: that you should not challenge to a fight.
Speaker 3: Ancient Egypt was called Kemy to the Egyptians, and Wassit
Speaker 3: was the capital, and Wassit is actually the name of
Speaker 3: the ceremonial mace that the pharaoh would brain his enemy with. Okay,
Speaker 3: so that's the name of the capital. And you'd go
Speaker 3: you'd go to Wassit, and the pyramids were there, and
Speaker 3: they were smooth and white because they were covered in
Speaker 3: very precisely cut limestone that was actually taken off of
Speaker 3: them by the Arab invaders who are the modern Egyptians
Speaker 3: and used to build Cairo. And so it was fantastically intimidating,
Speaker 3: and the pharaoh was the ruler of the known world.
Speaker 2: I feel like.
Speaker 1: Egyptians were like the first Instagram influencers, Like everyone looked
Speaker 1: up to them, and now that's just you just being
Speaker 1: so extra, so extra and bread banking.
Speaker 3: No, it is totally true. They were. You know that
Speaker 3: you can look at the temples at Karnak in places
Speaker 3: and that you see the pharaohs, and it was total instagram.
Speaker 3: They'd like have huge pictures of themselves and then descriptions
Speaker 3: of all the stuff that they had done. And this
Speaker 3: is this famous one. Actually Ramsey's the second, Ramsey's the Great,
Speaker 3: who is probably the pharaoh from the Bible, and he
Speaker 3: had he had this big military expedition early in his
Speaker 3: reign and he got his ass kicked and handed to him.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: But if you look at it, if you look at
Speaker 3: the the inscription of the picture of this in Karnak,
Speaker 3: this huge temple complex, like his advertising for himself, what
Speaker 3: it shows is a series of epic victories, each one
Speaker 3: just a little bit closer to home. So great, so great.
Speaker 1: I love that being a petty bitch has just been like,
Speaker 1: it's in our DNA, it's who we are. So Seamus
Speaker 1: got into all this history and a hunger.
Speaker 3: Arose learning all of this, which was really news to
Speaker 3: me because you know, the programmer physicist guy was really
Speaker 3: powerful and one day a few years ago. I guess
Speaker 3: less than that. Maybe two years ago. A friend of mine,
Speaker 3: who I know from the video game industry is a
Speaker 3: famous beer brewer, sent me a sample of some brewing
Speaker 3: yeast that had that was purportedly, you know, scraped from
Speaker 3: some ancient Egyptian pots and various companies brewing companies had
Speaker 3: made you know, ancient Egyptian beer with this stuff.
Speaker 1: But what if you tried baking with it? Wait, stupid question.
Speaker 1: Can you bake with beer YaST? Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's all the same, it's all the same stuff. Yeah. No,
Speaker 3: that beer and bread are really the right and left
Speaker 3: hand of the same thing. Okay, they really are. Like
Speaker 3: I said before, you know, just in one case, you know,
Speaker 3: in bread, you introduced a lot of air into the
Speaker 3: dough and it doesn't You don't and you don't take
Speaker 3: that long. You take maybe you know, half a day
Speaker 3: or eighteen hours if you're really crazy and trying to
Speaker 3: get really sour sourda. So you don't give the yeast
Speaker 3: really a lot of time to respiate anaerobically. So that
Speaker 3: doesn't make a lot of alcohol, but it makes a
Speaker 3: lot of CO two, which is what you want to
Speaker 3: leaven the bread, right, when you make beer, you seal
Speaker 3: it up and you get the yeast to make alcohol.
Speaker 1: Okay, and just a quick side note if you missed
Speaker 1: the Zimology episode on fermentation and beer. Yeasts are a
Speaker 1: fungus and they're single celled, and humans have been using
Speaker 1: them in food and drinks for thousands of years, starting
Speaker 1: in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. So you
Speaker 1: can see them under a microscope under four hundred times
Speaker 1: the power. But it wasn't until eighteen fifty seven when
Speaker 1: microbiologist and Frenchman and father of the rabies vaccine, Louis
Speaker 1: Pastor figured out that it was yeast and not just
Speaker 1: chemistry that made bread rise and beer bubble up.
Speaker 2: Eighteen fifty seven, that's when they figured it out.
Speaker 1: Now there's pretty much one common yeast used in baking
Speaker 1: and brewing with a ton of different strains, although there
Speaker 1: are a handful of other yeasts that do that work too.
Speaker 1: For thousands of years, bread was just made with whatever
Speaker 1: yeasts were naturally present, and these little critters had more
Speaker 1: time to break down the grains and then rise up
Speaker 1: the dough.
Speaker 3: There wasn't any Fleischman's yeast in the Old Kingdom you know,
Speaker 3: you didn't go to the supermarket and get your yeast
Speaker 3: out of the fridge. You collected it out of the air,
Speaker 3: or you know, it came in with your flower and
Speaker 3: or most likely you know, you were taking some of
Speaker 3: your old dough or some of the some of the
Speaker 3: yeast froth that develops on the top of beer and
Speaker 3: using that.
Speaker 1: And so this friend of yours is like, yo, I
Speaker 1: got to hook up some beer.
Speaker 3: So I get this old yeast and I bake with it,
Speaker 3: because you know, it's right in line with everything I love.
Speaker 3: It's a gyptology and all this, and I think to myself,
Speaker 3: this is fantastic. Like now, in addition to knowing the
Speaker 3: minds of these people, maybe we could share a meal
Speaker 3: with them. That would be tremendous, you know, you know,
Speaker 3: what would this be like? And so you sent research
Speaker 3: into what the grains were a little bit, and I
Speaker 3: baked this bread. And you know, I had been posting
Speaker 3: photographs of my you know, my medieval baking adventures of
Speaker 3: like trying to collect yeast out of the air in
Speaker 3: different places and use different grains. And I had started
Speaker 3: sort of milling some old grains, like milling rye, like
Speaker 3: the Central Europeans and trying to make you know, medieval
Speaker 3: peasant bread basically, And so I applied that technique to
Speaker 3: this Egyptian yeast and put pictures up and you know,
Speaker 3: I was used to, you know, getting a couple hundred
Speaker 3: likes or something, right, and like suddenly there were like
Speaker 3: millions of people watching us, right, And I was like,
Speaker 3: what the hell is going on? And it was really
Speaker 3: tense too, because I would send pictures like as I
Speaker 3: was baking during the day on Sunday because it was relaxing,
Speaker 3: and suddenly this was no longer relaxing. This like super
Speaker 3: intense because now was oh shit, this has to come out.
Speaker 3: And so but part of it was that people started
Speaker 3: asking questions like how do you know this is ancient yeast?
Speaker 3: Where'd you get this from? Like how do you know
Speaker 3: you're you're doing this the right way? How did they make?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: And I don't have any answers. And worst of all,
Speaker 3: my wife said, yeah, well you know they have a point.
Speaker 3: Oh cool. I found the most vocal critics, two of
Speaker 3: whom were doctor Serena Love and Rich Bowman, who's a
Speaker 3: microbiologist at the University of Iowa, And I said, all right,
Speaker 3: So you're right, so how would we fix it? How
Speaker 3: do you write? And that's where our little product was born.
Speaker 1: Well, he certainly leveled up from his sleepy Sunday bred sessions,
Speaker 1: and Seamus mentioned that there are still DNA and RNA
Speaker 1: analyzes to do and they're working on it. Given that
Speaker 1: it's pretty much like a sign hustle passion project.
Speaker 3: This is like gentlemanly science in the Victorian sense, right
Speaker 3: where we may be all professional scientists on other projects,
Speaker 3: but this is a little self funded project of our own.
Speaker 3: And so you know, getting DNA analysis of yeast is complex,
Speaker 3: and we're doing it, and that's just really a disclaimer.
Speaker 3: What we decided to do was take advantage of a
Speaker 3: couple of different things that are true about baking and
Speaker 3: natural yeast and ancient Egypt. First is that yeast and
Speaker 3: a lot of the bacteria that make up natural leavening
Speaker 3: can hibernate, They can go to sleep, they can encapsulate
Speaker 3: themselves in various and sundry ways and survive almost anything.
Speaker 3: People have taken yeast strains to space, expose them to
Speaker 3: vacuum in space, and brought them back to Earth and
Speaker 3: revive them. Yeast might be able to survive indefinitely long
Speaker 3: and dry it all the way out and then give
Speaker 3: it water again and it comes back.
Speaker 1: So this dormant state is called que sense and it
Speaker 1: means essentially to rest or, to snooze. I came across
Speaker 1: one microbiology paper called sleeping beauty quiescence in Sacromices service CI.
Speaker 1: But how does it even chill that hard? And how
Speaker 1: long can it take a fungus nap? Nobody knows.
Speaker 3: They may just be immortal, to be honest, and I'm
Speaker 3: not exaggerating, So that's important to note. The Other thing
Speaker 3: is that the ancient Egyptians used ceramics kind of like plastic.
Speaker 3: There's a very technical term Egyptologists use, which is crapwaar,
Speaker 3: and crapware is the pottery that Egyptians made in huge
Speaker 3: quantities and would just toss away when it broke and
Speaker 3: just make more, because they're constantly making it. And you
Speaker 3: find piles of this stuff apparently on digs, you know,
Speaker 3: like the size of houses of just broken pottery, of
Speaker 3: just a trash heap. If you find little cups for drinking,
Speaker 3: and you find brewing and baking vessels and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Well,
Speaker 3: all of the brewing and baking vessels are candidates for
Speaker 3: us because this was all like terra cotta.
Speaker 1: Terra cotta side note is unglazed pottery. It's that ruddy
Speaker 1: rough stuff.
Speaker 3: But it had what's called inclusions, which means basically animal
Speaker 3: pooh and sand and stuff. And what it meant was
Speaker 3: that these fired ceramics or porous and liquids could soak
Speaker 3: into them. And so the theory is, and I think
Speaker 3: it's true because we've done experiments on this and seen it,
Speaker 3: that the microbes that are in beer or baking activity
Speaker 3: can soak into the ceramic matrix, into the little pores
Speaker 3: in the middle of the walls of these vessels, right,
Speaker 3: and they can dry out and then you could throw
Speaker 3: the vessel away or bury it or whatever, and they're protected.
Speaker 3: It's like a little time capsule inside the middle of
Speaker 3: the pottery. Okay, when people say, oh, you know, we
Speaker 3: scraped some yeast off of the wall of a bakery
Speaker 3: or off you off a pot you know, I think
Speaker 3: you just scraped modern dirt off, especially if it's in
Speaker 3: a museum. You know, it's whatever dirt it was buried in,
Speaker 3: and you know, whatever was in the museum for hundreds
Speaker 3: of years. But inside really you can imagine the sort
Speaker 3: of porous microstructure of this pottery where the yeast had
Speaker 3: had seeped in and the bacteria and gone to sleep.
Speaker 3: They might still be there. And so rich Bowen's idea was,
Speaker 3: could we do a kind of microbial fracking on that.
Speaker 3: Could we use a fluid filled with nutrients and amino acids,
Speaker 3: all the stuff that these organisms like. Could we sort
Speaker 3: of flood a piece of ceramic with that, let it
Speaker 3: sit for a little while so that things wake up
Speaker 3: and start to sort of like let go of the
Speaker 3: surfaces that they're attached to, and then vacuuming them back
Speaker 3: up again and taking little lab and see if we
Speaker 3: can revive them a live it's a lie, Okay.
Speaker 1: So this pottery is fourth i years old and it
Speaker 1: was recovered from below a temple and Giza, near the
Speaker 1: base of the pyramids, and this plucky team of gastro
Speaker 1: egyptologists were allowed to suck up the yeast from these
Speaker 1: pieces at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and
Speaker 1: the Peabody Museum at Harvard because their collection methods were
Speaker 1: non invasive, so no scraping, no breaking, and open. They
Speaker 1: actually do three levels of samplings. This is not for
Speaker 1: casual hobbyists.
Speaker 3: So a lot of thought is put into this. In
Speaker 3: a very specific type of fluid is used. And when
Speaker 3: we do this, it's in a jerry sterile as much
Speaker 3: of a sterile environment as possible, Like I wear steril
Speaker 3: garb and masks and gloves and I mean stuff that's
Speaker 3: sucking on normal today. Last summer it was weird to
Speaker 3: see people dressed like this. Now you see people like
Speaker 3: that on the street, but.
Speaker 2: Fine towny twenty spring fashion.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Anyway, so that's how we end up sampling. And
Speaker 3: that was a protocol developed by Rich and answer to
Speaker 3: my question of okay, okay, smart guy, you want to
Speaker 3: tell me I'm doing it wrong, how do we do
Speaker 3: it right? But that's only half the equation, because the
Speaker 3: other half is like, how the hell do you get
Speaker 3: anybody to let you do this? Yeah? And you know,
Speaker 3: doctor Love, I mean, she really took a bet on
Speaker 3: me not being a crazy person, whether on being the
Speaker 3: right kind of crazy person, I guess, And she put
Speaker 3: a reputation on the line with with a lot of
Speaker 3: you know, really important people in the world of a
Speaker 3: apology that it was okay to talk to us and
Speaker 3: we wouldn't hurt anything, and this would be interesting.
Speaker 1: And what kind of pot exactly? Were you able to
Speaker 1: get access to a.
Speaker 2: Lot of pots?
Speaker 3: And you know, the pressure was really on for me
Speaker 3: because Serena had bet, you know, a lot of her
Speaker 3: reputation on this, as did Rich, and I would show
Speaker 3: up like you know, you know, I'm a particle physicist
Speaker 3: and everything about this to you know, to try to
Speaker 3: make good on this and then to make sure that
Speaker 3: the result was treated respectfully and but also get people
Speaker 3: excited about digitology. But anyway, that's an aside that the
Speaker 3: goal was to find the kinds of vessels that would
Speaker 3: have been infected with the culture, the beer and bread culture,
Speaker 3: where it would have dried out, so vessels that beer
Speaker 3: was brewed in, vessels that bread is kneeded in or
Speaker 3: rows in or where the dough was mixed. And we
Speaker 3: had a lot of guesses. We even we sampled actually
Speaker 3: you know, fossilized or preserved or dried out actual ceremonial
Speaker 3: loaves of bread that had been buried in the Old Kingdom.
Speaker 3: We tried a lot of different things. We have you know,
Speaker 3: a lot of samples. All of them were categorized, you know,
Speaker 3: by where they were taken, when it was from what
Speaker 3: the vessel was, which sample it was rich. Then freezes
Speaker 3: some of each one, so we have a record forever.
Speaker 3: So that's sitting it like basically, you know, minus eighty
Speaker 3: degree centigrade in a freezer in Iowa. And then he
Speaker 3: would feed some of them and develop them into colonies
Speaker 3: and select out the east and the bacteria and the
Speaker 3: things we're obviously modern and get rid of those.
Speaker 1: And then there are DNA and RNA extractions and further analysis.
Speaker 1: So first come the lap coasts, then come the aprons.
Speaker 3: And this is the Sunday morning hobby that everyone is
Speaker 3: looking for. Good Lord, super relaxing, super relaxing, no stress,
Speaker 3: really inexpensive.
Speaker 1: It's really diy exactly totally flying around.
Speaker 3: I was thinking, like, you know, learning how to make
Speaker 3: kombucha or maybe traveling all over the world doing microbial
Speaker 3: sampling of ancient Egyptian artifacts. One of the two.
Speaker 1: Okay, so once you get a few of these sleepy
Speaker 1: little yeasties, what do you do? How do you make
Speaker 1: it a thriving, grinding, burping, farting fungus party? Okay, here
Speaker 1: we go. We have the passion, we have the history,
Speaker 1: we have the context. So how do you start a starter?
Speaker 1: How much yeast do you need to make a starter?
Speaker 3: Not very much, because what you do is you amplify it.
Speaker 3: You need not more than a few cells. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's that's the trick. And those cells are everywhere. I
Speaker 3: always say, and I've actually considered doing this, that you
Speaker 3: can probably bake bread using the yeast in the air
Speaker 3: in your car hires because yeast it's just everywhere. I
Speaker 3: mean it's on everything everywhere. Oh yeah, the yeast is
Speaker 3: just it's everywhere. It's hard to not collect it. And
Speaker 3: you know, one of the funny things about the pandemic
Speaker 3: has been apparently it's a shortage of baking yeast.
Speaker 2: And you see all these yeah people are saying that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you see all these microbiologists responding on social media like, guys,
Speaker 3: there's no shortage of yeast. What the hell are you saying?
Speaker 3: So what you really want to do, what you really
Speaker 3: need to do is you need to amplify it so
Speaker 3: that you have you know, enough yeast, like enough you know,
Speaker 3: hundreds of billion ends of the cells to make a
Speaker 3: loaf of bread, and you just do that by feeding
Speaker 3: it and it's actually pretty simple. And again this goes
Speaker 3: back to like the luck that we have as a
Speaker 3: human race, and this is so easy. So you just
Speaker 3: feed it flour because you want it to eat flour.
Speaker 3: So you have this jar of stuff and you keep
Speaker 3: feeding it flour and like pouring half off, and eventually
Speaker 3: everything that can eat flowers and a die because it's starving, right,
Speaker 3: and the stuff that can eat flowers going to reproduce
Speaker 3: and reproduce and reproduce make huges like amazing, like you know,
Speaker 3: buffet orgy, right, until you have a lot of it
Speaker 3: in this jar and you're purifying it by doing this.
Speaker 3: And that's really what raising a starter culture is.
Speaker 1: It's maybe all the ever in your favor.
Speaker 3: And I think you should feel vaguely guilty about it
Speaker 3: when you have your surdough starter.
Speaker 1: Frankly, you went like full full hog what do they
Speaker 1: call that? You went ham on it. And you use
Speaker 1: like hand churned, hand grained like amorant and old Egyptian
Speaker 1: grains to do this low right, Yeah, Well.
Speaker 3: The Egyptians used a very early wheat, the first cultivated
Speaker 3: wheat we think called emmer which is also faraoh for bread,
Speaker 3: and they used barley and iron corn also, but usually
Speaker 3: just for beer, and those are also both very primitive grains.
Speaker 3: Like barley is used for like soup. Now pharaoh is
Speaker 3: like put into warm salads.
Speaker 1: Seamus makes a point that emmer or pharaoh and barley,
Speaker 1: these were like the burliest of grains they built the
Speaker 1: people that built empires. But you may now recognize it
Speaker 1: from the menu of a boho chic outdoor wedding reception.
Speaker 3: The Roman armies that conquered Europe were fed emmer, and
Speaker 3: now it's used for warm salads. So that's kind of cool.
Speaker 3: I'm sure that you know, a huge, like muscle bound
Speaker 3: centurion would find that amazingly amusing. So you know, we
Speaker 3: got that stuff, but not only for accuracy, but also
Speaker 3: you know this microbes have been asleep a very long time.
Speaker 3: You know, if we actually did get ancient microbes, then
Speaker 3: they lived and went to sleep before modern wheat had
Speaker 3: ever been bred. They have no knowledge of it. They
Speaker 3: want to eat emmer. And what we found just anecdotally
Speaker 3: is that you know, this culture that we have, the
Speaker 3: one that I use actively because you know, we have
Speaker 3: hundreds of samples but I just use one actively because
Speaker 3: I sort of stole it around the edge to try out.
Speaker 3: It doesn't like modern wheat. I took one sample home,
Speaker 3: I sent the rest to Rich and this one sample
Speaker 3: I started to kind of raise like a regular sour
Speaker 3: dough starter, but in a sterile environment, right, like sterilized
Speaker 3: all the food and water that it gets. And I
Speaker 3: use like UV lights and flames and stuff to make
Speaker 3: sure that didn't getaminated with anything. So it's really just
Speaker 3: that sample. It's recently actually, I sent some of it
Speaker 3: back to Rich and he confirmed that I haven't contaminated yet,
Speaker 3: which is pretty good. Me have a lot of cool
Speaker 3: equipment in my kitchen too, which is great. But I
Speaker 3: when I when I split off some of this stuff
Speaker 3: and try to feed it like modern wheat or hard
Speaker 3: red wheat or any of these vrietals that we developed
Speaker 3: over the past couple thousand years, it doesn't grow very well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, thank you.
Speaker 3: And when I feed a emmer, it's like crazy, it
Speaker 3: just it loves it. It's what you know, it's it's
Speaker 3: it's it's it's food. Know, it's it's comfort food. And
Speaker 3: that's a good sign. That's part of what gives me
Speaker 3: confidence that we've that we've actually captured some ancient organisms.
Speaker 1: Seamus says that sour dough is three ingredients flour, water
Speaker 1: and salt, and then of course all the little yeasties
Speaker 1: in the air. Now, the rest, he says, is just technique. Okay,
Speaker 1: think of it as way. So you can have three
Speaker 1: balls sitting on a counter. They don't do much, but
Speaker 1: if you learn to juggle, dang, those three things just
Speaker 1: became a party. So it's not the objects, it's just
Speaker 1: what should do with them.
Speaker 3: There have been teams who have made ancient bread quote
Speaker 3: unquote and ancient beer quote unquote, and they say, oh,
Speaker 3: it's not very good, and ancient people must have had
Speaker 3: different tastes than it. Oh, you know, Bill, fuck you
Speaker 3: just bullshit, you know bullshit. No, it's just that you're
Speaker 3: bad at it. It's that you're a scientist. And you
Speaker 3: may be a very talented scientist, but you're not a baker.
Speaker 3: And if you had a master baker in and that
Speaker 3: master baker took the time to learn how to do this,
Speaker 3: that person could probably make really excellent bread using these
Speaker 3: ingredients and these techniques, just like the people millennia ago
Speaker 3: did just like in the navy, where the food is
Speaker 3: the most important part of the morale of the sailor.
Speaker 3: You know, the food is the most important part of
Speaker 3: the morale of these work crews. And all these guns
Speaker 3: were put up in these temporary towns that were at
Speaker 3: the base of the pyramids, at the base of the
Speaker 3: temples they were building, and we find the bakeries there,
Speaker 3: and the breweries there, and the kitchens and the flophouses
Speaker 3: where they all slept. And you know they were fed well.
Speaker 3: I mean a guy who works out all day moving
Speaker 3: multi ton blocks of granite, you know, and moving them
Speaker 3: in the position within like the width of a piece
Speaker 3: of paper, next to one another, which is how the
Speaker 3: stones are set in the pyramid, right, those guys had
Speaker 3: high caloric intake. They needed to be fed really well.
Speaker 3: And so I think the job of figuring this out
Speaker 3: is figuring out how do you make bread that would
Speaker 3: have satisfied those guys. You know, a guy who could
Speaker 3: like trivially snap your neck after moving around four ton
Speaker 3: blocks of grantite all day.
Speaker 1: When someone has been hauling tons of huge bricks for lunch,
Speaker 1: you do not hand them another brick.
Speaker 3: You don't do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so you you baked it, it came out
Speaker 1: of the oven. How was it?
Speaker 3: It was really good? I mean it was and you know,
Speaker 3: but again, like I knew it was going to be
Speaker 3: really good because I could tell that it was going well.
Speaker 3: I could tell that the starter was doing well, you know,
Speaker 3: because I had done it all before. It wasn't like
Speaker 3: a big mysterious reveal like sort of everybody wants to
Speaker 3: tell a story, you know.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Yeah, it was a little sweeter, you said
Speaker 1: on Twitter, was a little sweeter.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, you know, all sour dough starters taste different
Speaker 3: if you if you collect them different places. You know,
Speaker 3: people say, oh, it's the water and all these things.
Speaker 3: Now it's just it's just like it's just the microbe content, right,
Speaker 3: and the different species of microbes produce different flavor, and
Speaker 3: the flour that you use produced a different flavor. It's
Speaker 3: not it's not you know, mysterious craziness. And you know
Speaker 3: I could this culture when I was amplifying it, when
Speaker 3: I was feeding it the sterilized emmra flower, it smelled
Speaker 3: really different from my other starters, really really different. It's
Speaker 3: probably what excited me about it. And when we tried
Speaker 3: the bread. The bread was had had a different delicate
Speaker 3: sweet character. Yeah, it was sweeter, and you know it
Speaker 3: was it was sour in a more delicate way, and
Speaker 3: you know, the the the main thing was just that,
Speaker 3: And I mean the miraculous thing was that it made bread.
Speaker 3: I mean, it made a really nice loaf of bread.
Speaker 3: And it was this starter made by sampling a pot.
Speaker 3: And you just to understand that we did it in
Speaker 3: sterile conditions with sterile fluids, and that it was you know,
Speaker 3: always moved under UV light in sterile conditions and fed
Speaker 3: sterilized it, so there's nothing in it that didn't come
Speaker 3: from the inside of that pot at all. And it
Speaker 3: made bread. You know, that's that's amazing to me. And
Speaker 3: watching it and doing it yourself and taking the care
Speaker 3: and ensuring that it's all sterile and then seeing that
Speaker 3: happen is extraordinary. So yeah, I mean, the flavor was
Speaker 3: different and that was really cool, and I was glad
Speaker 3: for it because it made me feel like maybe we
Speaker 3: had done something right. The overarching thing for me is
Speaker 3: a little bit more subtle, and maybe after listening to
Speaker 3: me talk about all this, this is going to make sense.
Speaker 3: But for me, the emotional thing wasn't eating the bread
Speaker 3: for me. The emotional thing was that, you know, forty
Speaker 3: five hundred years ago, there was someone who was making
Speaker 3: this bread, and she had her starter, and it was
Speaker 3: her whole life, and she was making all these thaves
Speaker 3: of bread for all these workmen on the Giza plateau,
Speaker 3: and it was her job in her life, and it
Speaker 3: was her work. And I got a little bit of
Speaker 3: her starter, and I got to be there with her baking,
Speaker 3: and I was with her, and that for me was
Speaker 3: the most important and most mind blowing thing.
Speaker 2: That you have a connection with this person.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a real connection.
Speaker 1: Not bullshit too, you'll never you'll never meet, but yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Sheemus made the point that the Egyptian culture and religion
Speaker 1: was based on the idea of eternal life and coming
Speaker 1: back from periods of dormancy of forced inactivity. So if
Speaker 1: you're listening to this in your Tuesday's webpants, that might
Speaker 1: strike a chord.
Speaker 3: The symbolism, the idea of resurrecting that and sharing that
Speaker 3: activity and this basic, most important activity of making food
Speaker 3: like that is really special, and I think at the
Speaker 3: end of the day, that might be why people are
Speaker 3: so interested in this because otherwise it's inexplicable. I mean,
Speaker 3: you know, watching yeast cultures grow is not possibly the
Speaker 3: most thrilling thing.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean seeing something fart is fun.
Speaker 3: Sure, Okay, Now I hadn't thought about that.
Speaker 2: That's true.
Speaker 1: Starters too, like sourdough starters are really personal to people,
Speaker 1: like they carry them around in jars, they're named, and
Speaker 1: you know, I think right now, with this pandemic, we're
Speaker 1: seeing a ton of people start to bake, and a
Speaker 1: ton of people start to make their own sourdough, which
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've noticed. Number one, did you name this
Speaker 1: sourdough starter? And what makes something a sourdough starter versus
Speaker 1: another starter? Very stupid question, but you're smart, so I'm
Speaker 1: asking it.
Speaker 3: No, it's okay. So again, like that, you just have
Speaker 3: to keep in mind our place in history that being
Speaker 3: able to buy purified yeast for baking that's designed, really
Speaker 3: genetically designed for baking is a really new thing. It's
Speaker 3: really only the past one hundred years or so. Prior
Speaker 3: to that, all bread was made with natural yeast, which
Speaker 3: we would call sour dough. So you really don't think
Speaker 3: about it, like, you know, a sourdough starter is really
Speaker 3: just a sample of microbial culture, and that culture can
Speaker 3: eat flour and make gas and leave in your bread.
Speaker 3: That's it. So sourdough really is a modern concept, and
Speaker 3: a lot of the reason we call it sourdough is
Speaker 3: because there's a specific style of baking with those organisms
Speaker 3: where you have much longer fermentation or a cooler temperature
Speaker 3: that brings out more of the lactic acid, which is
Speaker 3: what the bacteria poop out and causes the bread to
Speaker 3: be more sour. And that is done both because people
Speaker 3: prefer that flavor, but also because it makes the bread
Speaker 3: last longer because that lactic acid is a preservative. So
Speaker 3: if you're going to be, you know, selling food to minors,
Speaker 3: as they did in San Francisco, then having more lactic
Speaker 3: acid helps the bread to last longerk not go molded.
Speaker 1: And that lactic acid tang comes from a lacto bacillis
Speaker 1: bacteria full name, you're ready for this, Lacto Bacillis San
Speaker 1: franciscanis God. That's a lot of assays because of San
Speaker 1: Francisco's sourdough history. Now, I was born there and I
Speaker 1: grew up in the Bay Area. I never realized literally
Speaker 1: until this episode. Just how hyperlocal sourdough culture, if you will,
Speaker 1: was clamchowder served in a bread bowl.
Speaker 2: It's a way of life. And if you don't.
Speaker 1: Eat the bread bowl, you're actually not allowed back into
Speaker 1: the city, which is harsh.
Speaker 2: But it's fair. Also, what about gluten?
Speaker 1: Okay, one percent of folks have Celiac disease, which is
Speaker 1: an autoimmune disorder that damages a little fingery absorption villae
Speaker 1: in the intestines, and gluten can trigger all sorts of
Speaker 1: terrible symptoms. But many more of us may have non
Speaker 1: Celiac glutens sensitivities or can't break down totally different parts
Speaker 1: of wheat like fruit dance. So sourdough starter and long
Speaker 1: fermentation can help break down some of that gluten, yes,
Speaker 1: but also the hard to digest fruit tins and polysaccharides,
Speaker 1: which may be why folks have an easier time eating
Speaker 1: European made breads because they straight up might have way
Speaker 1: better yeast starters that break that stuff down. Research is ongoing,
Speaker 1: but yes, there is gluten and sourdough less than other
Speaker 1: types of unfermented dose. But if you find that sourdough
Speaker 1: doesn't bug your butt like other breads. Gluten may or
Speaker 1: may not even be the real issue. It could be
Speaker 1: other stuff in wheat that just needed to be properly
Speaker 1: broken down before you eat it.
Speaker 3: The fact of the matter is that there's a lot
Speaker 3: of gluten and bread because it's what makes the balloons
Speaker 3: that the gas fills that causes it to rise. So,
Speaker 3: you know, saying there's less or more gluten is kind
Speaker 3: of funny. As a baker, you want more gluten because
Speaker 3: that's how your bread rises. And if you don't have gluten,
Speaker 3: then you have to have something else that can make
Speaker 3: little balloons inside the dough to hold the gas, which
Speaker 3: is ultimately what makes it makes it bread. Bread is
Speaker 3: like it's like it's like it's really like froth farming. Right,
Speaker 3: you make a foam, right, he rises and it's a foam,
Speaker 3: and then you freeze that foam in the oven and
Speaker 3: then you eat it. Really kind of is what the
Speaker 3: deal is with that? And and so you ask also
Speaker 3: if I named the culture, and no, I didn't name
Speaker 3: the Egyptian culture because it doesn't belong to me. It
Speaker 3: belongs to that baker. And that's a really important thing
Speaker 3: to keep in mind. You know, we looted so much
Speaker 3: stuff out of Egypt in the West and also worldwide.
Speaker 3: These things belonged to the ancient Egyptians. They made them,
Speaker 3: and they belonged to them. And this, this this culture
Speaker 3: is no different. It belongs to that Baker. So my
Speaker 3: intention is, once we've done our work, to return that
Speaker 3: to Egypt and to make a strong point about the
Speaker 3: ownership of that. So that's why I didn't name it.
Speaker 1: Seamus thinks people have probably named their starters for centuries,
Speaker 1: and there's one page on Reddit of just folks sharing
Speaker 1: their starter names, such as I plucked a few for you,
Speaker 1: Bradley Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Yeast, Mike Yeast Face, Vincent van
Speaker 1: do Do and dewe sa channel the name of the subreddit
Speaker 1: breddit nice. Now, this tradition in the past may have
Speaker 1: come from a family necessity rather than a hobby, but
Speaker 1: you know, in a time of sheltering, of getting out
Speaker 1: of the store less, being able to make your own
Speaker 1: fresh food at home feels kind of more important these days.
Speaker 3: It's like the difference between somebody naming their yacht and
Speaker 3: somebody naming their fishing boat. Yeah, you know, one is
Speaker 3: a lot more serious.
Speaker 1: Do you think it's Do you think that people making
Speaker 1: their own bread is somehow like an attempt to feel
Speaker 1: more grounded to those times?
Speaker 3: I think it's the most human thing you can do.
Speaker 3: I think that the story of bread and the story
Speaker 3: of the human race are inextricably LinkedIn and I should
Speaker 3: I should point out here that that's kind of biased.
Speaker 3: You know, in Asia it's really the story of rice
Speaker 3: and rice cultivation. But it's that same deep connection, maybe
Speaker 3: in a really deep way, in a genetic sense, the
Speaker 3: idea of bread and the comfort of bread and the
Speaker 3: baking of bread being the most comforting thing, the most grounding,
Speaker 3: homey thing we can do. You know, we evolved with that.
Speaker 3: It's in us that I think it may be that
Speaker 3: we have it backwards. It may be that it's inescapable
Speaker 3: in a crisis that people will start to bake mm hmm.
Speaker 1: And if you inspire other people to bake, then it's
Speaker 1: your fault if they're walking around with named jars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's been pointed out to me. I've had people
Speaker 3: on social media who I thought we're joking but are
Speaker 3: actually angry with me that there's no power, like I like, literally,
Speaker 3: I was like, oh yeah, ha haha, No, fuck you.
Speaker 3: It's like, whoa, Okay dude, I just don't think I'm
Speaker 3: actually responsible.
Speaker 1: But okay, well I do have a ton of questions
Speaker 1: from listeners. Can I just super lightning round, like throw
Speaker 1: a couple at you?
Speaker 3: Yeah? For sure, I'm sorry I talked so long ago.
Speaker 2: I love it. Are you kidding? This is my favorite?
Speaker 1: After the break how to bake bread and all of
Speaker 1: your questions. But first, every episode we donate to a
Speaker 1: cause of the ologists choosing you know that, and with
Speaker 1: no hesitation, Seamus asked that his go to the Boys
Speaker 1: and Girls Clubs of America. The Boys and Girls Clubs
Speaker 1: provide a safe haven for more than four million youth,
Speaker 1: giving them an opportunity to discover their great futures. They
Speaker 1: have tutoring and mentorship and after school programs, and a
Speaker 1: donation went to them in Seamus's name. That donation was
Speaker 1: made possible by some sponsors of the show. You may
Speaker 1: hear about now.
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Speaker 1: Okay, how to culture a starter and bake some bread?
Speaker 1: And your questions? The first question was from patron and
Speaker 1: a mutual beloved friend, Casey Handmer. Seamus worked with his
Speaker 1: kick ass brilliant wife, doctor Christine Corbett, and Casey is
Speaker 1: also a genius and an accomplished baker. And I had
Speaker 1: no idea these two were buds. But Seamus and I
Speaker 1: off air spun a while just chatting about how wonderful
Speaker 1: and curious and smart they are. Anyway, Kasey hanmer Ken
Speaker 1: yeast synthesized vitamins, what's up with that?
Speaker 3: I think yeast can actually be made to synthesize almost anything.
Speaker 3: I've looked at some papers recently, Casey and I will
Speaker 3: text them to you where people actually have yeast making
Speaker 3: all sorts of molecules. And there's actually a naturally occurring
Speaker 3: yeast that makes oil. It makes actually make olefins and
Speaker 3: even wax. So it's an incredibly versatile life form.
Speaker 2: Dang okay.
Speaker 1: Side note, I did some digging of my own and
Speaker 1: for some light bedtime reading, may I suggest the Journal
Speaker 1: of Microbial Cell Factories March twenty nineteen paper titled increasing
Speaker 1: Johoba like wax estra production in sacho remics SERAVISI by
Speaker 1: enhancing very long chain monosaturated fatty acid synthesis.
Speaker 2: It's a ripper.
Speaker 1: Helen Pang wants to know how does yeast activity correlate
Speaker 1: to temperature? Like how how fast does sour dough rise
Speaker 1: at forty degrees versus sixty degrees versus eighty degrees?
Speaker 3: That okay, So that's a complicated question, and I will
Speaker 3: unnecessarily complicate it further. So yeast, like all microbes, operates
Speaker 3: at a higher rate at a higher temperature. Right up
Speaker 3: in tell you start to like, you know, shake it
Speaker 3: apart with heat and it dies. Proofing your bread at
Speaker 3: higher temperature is going to make it proof faster. It's
Speaker 3: going to change the way that the water moves around
Speaker 3: in your dough, and it's going to change some other
Speaker 3: things about it too, So you got to be careful
Speaker 3: not to go really hot all the time. But the
Speaker 3: flavor profile of the bread also gets changed, specifically with
Speaker 3: sour dough, because you have a mix of microorganisms, and
Speaker 3: all of those microorganisms are more or less happy at
Speaker 3: different temperatures, like bacteria are much happier at lower temperatures.
Speaker 3: And I mentioned before when we were talking about San
Speaker 3: Francisco sourdough, that you can make bread more sour by
Speaker 3: fermenting at a lower temperature for a longer period of time,
Speaker 3: and that's because the bacteria are happier there. On the
Speaker 3: other side, in Egypt, on the Giza Plateau, it's pretty
Speaker 3: hot during the day. And so one of the things
Speaker 3: I learned about these these samples that we have from
Speaker 3: there is that they're really happy working at ninety five
Speaker 3: or ninety eight degrees like it, and in fat you
Speaker 3: can get a fairly sour bread at ninety degrees, which
Speaker 3: I don't find to be the case with other sour
Speaker 3: dough starters that I have.
Speaker 1: And again, a sour dough starter is just water, flour
Speaker 1: and whatever little single celled friends and lacked Opacilla's bacteria
Speaker 1: harmoniously chomp and break it down. Baker's yeasts or quick
Speaker 1: yeasts that you buy in a package work faster, but
Speaker 1: they may have fewer nutritional and digestive benefits than fermenting
Speaker 1: your dough and raising a beautiful, burping, sour dough baby
Speaker 1: that you name like ready White or scoop doggy Dog.
Speaker 2: You got to understand that you're the gift that keeps
Speaker 2: on giving.
Speaker 1: Rid Also, Elliott Warren great question said I heard of
Speaker 1: someone making bread using their vaginal yeast and I thought
Speaker 1: that was so cool. Maybe not recommended, but super cool,
Speaker 1: Elliott says, And yes, Elliott, I looked it up for
Speaker 1: all of us. That is one way to get yeast,
Speaker 1: and Zoe Stavry, a British blogger, wrote all about it.
Speaker 1: I followed some links of hers and it led me
Speaker 1: to getting ric rolled. But I'm never one to give up.
Speaker 1: I'm never gonna let you down, so I kept searching
Speaker 1: and her blog post I finally found it. It said
Speaker 1: the end product of this experiment was pretty tasty, but
Speaker 1: the yeast was likely just the stuff that was in
Speaker 1: the air and in the flower. There are better, maybe
Speaker 1: less personally invasive ways to procure fresh wild yeast and
Speaker 1: patrons including Heather moonro TOVERH Henness and his lovely wife
Speaker 1: Marie Stridam, Veronica, Brandon Lapin, and Carl Corumbo wanted to
Speaker 1: know about proper yeast hunting in the wild. Danielle Garrett
Speaker 1: wants to know first time question ask her how does
Speaker 1: one know what kind of wild yeast is good for?
Speaker 3: What?
Speaker 1: Like is the yeast found in certain areas of the wild?
Speaker 1: And Sam Gordon wants to know do yeast from different
Speaker 1: locations contribute to the bed, break the bread big time
Speaker 1: or rise?
Speaker 2: Like if you were going to let's.
Speaker 1: Say, go out you get a wild hair to get
Speaker 1: a wild yeast.
Speaker 2: What is a good strategy?
Speaker 3: Well, if you thinks so, yeah, different yece you collect
Speaker 3: in different places absolutely taste different and they act different.
Speaker 3: A lot of questions going in social media right now
Speaker 3: from close friends of mine. Are you know, oh my god,
Speaker 3: how long is this going to take? You know? How
Speaker 3: long should it rise? How long you know is my
Speaker 3: starter going to take to you know, get over the
Speaker 3: rubber band that I put around my jar? And the
Speaker 3: answer is look based on how much water versus flower.
Speaker 3: You have, what microbes, you have, what temperature it is,
Speaker 3: Everything changes, And that's part of the great thing about
Speaker 3: baking with Sarado is that it's not like a rules
Speaker 3: based thing. It's the ultimate escape from you know, programming
Speaker 3: or actuarial work. You don't know. It's one hundred percent
Speaker 3: field and you just have to watch and smell and
Speaker 3: listen and learn and practice a lot. And there are
Speaker 3: a lot of you know, there are a lot of
Speaker 3: Instagrammers who have like, you know, this is my Sarato starter,
Speaker 3: and I'm going to be honest with you. Everyone I
Speaker 3: know who's a baker knows that they're full of shit.
Speaker 3: Like they're putting commercial yeast in there and showing a
Speaker 3: pop up. It's totally clear. Also, there are a lot
Speaker 3: of bakers out there on Instagram and on Twitter who say, oh,
Speaker 3: here's my under percent whole wheat, and you're like, that
Speaker 3: is not one hundred percent whole wheat, Like it has
Speaker 3: none of the signs of being whole wheat, and you're
Speaker 3: full of shit. But we try to be nice, but no,
Speaker 3: it's you get a different flavor everywhere, and look, there's
Speaker 3: yeast in the flower that you get because the yeast
Speaker 3: is living on the grain and the wild on the farm,
Speaker 3: so you can actually make a good starter in your kitchen.
Speaker 3: You don't have to, you know, sterilize your flower and
Speaker 3: then go out in nature and collect it. I do
Speaker 3: that because I want to get different flavors and characteristics
Speaker 3: from the yeast that we get in different places. But
Speaker 3: you don't have to. If you just want to experiment
Speaker 3: with a starter, and you don't have to use whole grain,
Speaker 3: you can use regular white bread flour and you're gonna
Speaker 3: have a much easier time. And I'd encourage you to
Speaker 3: do that. But you know, if you are a freak
Speaker 3: like me and you go out in the field, you'll
Speaker 3: get all sorts of different organisms from different places and
Speaker 3: they'll give you really different flavors in your breads, and
Speaker 3: it's like super fun and interesting, and it's also you know,
Speaker 3: it's communing with our ancestors who had no choice, right
Speaker 3: you can really respect them by trying to see if
Speaker 3: you can bake like they did, trying to see if
Speaker 3: you could feed your family with some grass seed and
Speaker 3: some water and some salt if you're lucky. And that's
Speaker 3: really you know, that's that's a cool thing. And again,
Speaker 3: you know, in this crisis that we have now, I
Speaker 3: think that you know, we all are drawn are drawn
Speaker 3: back towards that and I and I think it is
Speaker 3: important to remember that people endured much bigger challenges than
Speaker 3: the one we have right now, with much less and
Speaker 3: did great.
Speaker 1: So if you're sad about staying in or annoyed that
Speaker 1: you're missing Coachella, I get it, But remember we are
Speaker 1: saving a lot of pain, including our own, by just
Speaker 1: sheltering a place. You used to have to know CBR
Speaker 1: or how to work a fire hose in order to
Speaker 1: save lives. But isn't it cool you can do the
Speaker 1: same thing just by watching Netflix and eating frozen pizza
Speaker 1: or baking bread?
Speaker 2: But how do you do it?
Speaker 1: So many of you patrons wanted to know what are.
Speaker 2: The tips for baking? Where do we start? She a
Speaker 2: little page?
Speaker 1: Michael Aguier, Ira Gray Germo, Rihano, Anni Kaloniko, Kim Kelly Samon,
Speaker 1: Katherine Gilbert, Katie Coast, Kayleie Rohan. First time question askers
Speaker 1: Rachel Davis and Heather Moore all wanted to know how
Speaker 1: do we start? Kelly said any tips on homemade bread
Speaker 1: one could make it home with access to flower, no yeast,
Speaker 1: and a housemate who will absolutely throw away anything bubbling
Speaker 1: in a jar, no matter how much promise it holds.
Speaker 1: Kathy Gilbert wanted to know why the f can't I
Speaker 1: cook bread? Fails every time we understand. That's why we're here.
Speaker 1: If you were going to start, if you're like, this
Speaker 1: is it? I want to I want to work with
Speaker 1: my hands. I want to get my mind off of things.
Speaker 1: I want to bake bread. Where should people start?
Speaker 3: Well, there are a lot of resources that if you
Speaker 3: look on my Twitter page at just seamous Blackley on Twitter,
Speaker 3: one word I am continuously putting up there a big
Speaker 3: thread that has a thread on yeast collection with some
Speaker 3: like you know, jokes of various levels of funny in it.
Speaker 3: But it has pictures and shows you exactly what it
Speaker 3: should look like. And it takes about a week and
Speaker 3: then there's a titorial and then taking that and making
Speaker 3: your first loaf of bread with it, and a lot
Speaker 3: of people have had success doing it. And like I said,
Speaker 3: there are many resources for this. You can look all
Speaker 3: over the place and a lot of really great, you know,
Speaker 3: video pictorial examples of how to do this. You should
Speaker 3: look for it. It's really not that hard once you
Speaker 3: get your mind around it. It's like training a dog,
Speaker 3: and dog trainers always tell you that you're not training
Speaker 3: the dog, you're training yourself, right, And it's the same thing.
Speaker 3: It's training yourself to pay attention to what you're doing
Speaker 3: and not thinking that. It's like an app and you
Speaker 3: tell it bread now bread and it does it. That's
Speaker 3: not how it works. Yeah, Okay, you need to get
Speaker 3: out of yourself, get out of your fucking head, and
Speaker 3: get into the dough a little bit, and the reward
Speaker 3: you're going to get is manyfold.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: I searched his Twitter and I found this massive thread
Speaker 1: from June second, twenty nine, and I'm going to read
Speaker 1: it to you very quickly in an overview. I'm also
Speaker 1: going to link this in the show notes. Okay, So
Speaker 1: Seamus wrote, first, you need to have a very active
Speaker 1: technical term bang in yeast culture ready. We will need
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty grams of culture for this loaf.
Speaker 1: So put eighty to ninety grams of flour in a bowl,
Speaker 1: pour twenty grams of your main culture in and mix
Speaker 1: with enough pure water to get the consistency shown here.
Speaker 1: Also side note from me, go for pure water or
Speaker 1: filtered water, or boil your water and let it cool.
Speaker 1: That way, it doesn't have a bunch of chlorine that
Speaker 1: kills your yeast. Just saying okay, Seamus says, now wait
Speaker 1: while you wait, He says, take a moment to get
Speaker 1: your shit together. You're going to need three hundred plus
Speaker 1: grams of filtered water that you let sit for thirty
Speaker 1: plus minutes, pure sea or mind salt, really good extravergin,
Speaker 1: olive oil, and the best flour you can find. Other
Speaker 1: things need to have ready, he says, an oven that
Speaker 1: can really get to five hundred degrees fahrenheit or two
Speaker 1: sixty centigrade, a good kitchen scale, a whisk, a big
Speaker 1: main bowl, a medium bowl, a baking sheet, some ice cubes,
Speaker 1: plastic or waxed cloth, and the ability to stay sane
Speaker 1: while nothing seems to happen.
Speaker 2: He says, he.
Speaker 1: Shows a picture of what your culture will look like
Speaker 1: when it's just about ready to go. There's a bubbly surface,
Speaker 1: looks like jello, and he says, we're ready to begin.
Speaker 1: Using your scale and being exact as you can, add
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty grams of water twenty five grams
Speaker 1: of oil and one hundred and fifty grams culture to
Speaker 1: your bowl.
Speaker 2: The culture should float, he says.
Speaker 1: Now add one hundred grams of the flour. Now whisk
Speaker 1: everything together until it's smooth. We want a lot of
Speaker 1: air in the mix for the yeast to respiate. Remember
Speaker 1: these little dudes gotta breathe. Next, he says, add the
Speaker 1: remaining four hundred grams of flour to make a total
Speaker 1: of five hundred. Mix it around. There are pictures of
Speaker 1: the consistency, he says. If it's too dry, add a
Speaker 1: little water and need it too wet. Use some flour
Speaker 1: should be just on the edge of sticky, but not
Speaker 1: actually coming off of anything. Now cover it and wait
Speaker 1: for half an hour. What's happening, he says, is that
Speaker 1: water is moving around and filling all the flour, dragging
Speaker 1: the yeast along with it.
Speaker 2: He says.
Speaker 1: Next, we either a die of boredom or prepare the
Speaker 1: bowl for the next step. He shows some nee eating
Speaker 1: tips folding some salt into the dough. He says, to
Speaker 1: recap mix all the stuff together. Wait like an abandoned dog,
Speaker 1: kneed in the salt. Wait like an unwonted lover. Do
Speaker 1: the foldy thing, wait, foldy, wait some more foldy nearly
Speaker 1: perish from on Wii. He goes on to detail how
Speaker 1: to continue to let it rise acute pretty slice in it,
Speaker 1: tossing it in a five hundred gree oven for ten minutes,
Speaker 1: then putting in some ice cubes, lowering the heat and
Speaker 1: letting it continue to cook and become bread. Anyway, that
Speaker 1: is an overview. If you go to alleywar dot com
Speaker 1: slash ologies slash gastro Egyptology, I will link this particular
Speaker 1: Twitter thread. There's so many photos, so many videos, and
Speaker 1: just follow Seamus Blackley while you're there for all of
Speaker 1: your bread inspiration needs. Rachel Davis has a first time,
Speaker 1: first time question asking her She says, what's the best
Speaker 1: type of pan to bake bread? In?
Speaker 2: Glass? Metal, ceramic? Does it matter with bread?
Speaker 3: Apparently not? If you don't, i'st anything you want to,
Speaker 3: you know, Rachel, it's a good question. And hey, but
Speaker 3: you know people have maked bread in literally everything. You know,
Speaker 3: Hobos make bread on railroad tracks, as Casey knows, the
Speaker 3: Australians have damper bread, which is made on a hot plate.
Speaker 3: The Egyptians baked with no ovens in pots that they
Speaker 3: buried in a hole with embers in them. You can
Speaker 3: bake probably in anything. If you're starting out as a
Speaker 3: baker and you're doing your oven, the easiest thing to
Speaker 3: do is to bake inside a Dutch oven inside your
Speaker 3: oven or any kind of like you know, stoneware or
Speaker 3: metal pot. If you're an inexperienced baker, it helps you
Speaker 3: to get really nice looking loves because it keeps all
Speaker 3: the moisture around the bread and moisture inside the oven.
Speaker 3: Believe it or not, is really helps the bread to
Speaker 3: stay elastic as it bakes and as it expands in
Speaker 3: the oven. And you probably see these videos of like
Speaker 3: bread baking in the oven. That's so amazing.
Speaker 2: This is the joy for me.
Speaker 3: I love bread. If you have a container and a
Speaker 3: container inside your oven, it really helps with that. So
Speaker 3: you can look up Dutch oven. Dutch oven bread baking
Speaker 3: is a really great way to start.
Speaker 1: If you're like a Dutch oven. Are we talking about
Speaker 1: farting again, No, ma'am, we're not so. A Dutch oven
Speaker 1: is like a cast iron pot with a lid, and
Speaker 1: the benefit to starting off baking your bread in a
Speaker 1: sealed pot is that it traps the steam from the
Speaker 1: dough and it gives your sour dough a good rise
Speaker 1: and a shiny crust. So if you have an oven
Speaker 1: safe pot with a lid, look into baking times without action.
Speaker 1: Oh and speaking of upper crust, Riley Clinging Smith wants
Speaker 1: to know why do people make slits at the top
Speaker 1: of lobes before baking them. Is it decorative or functional?
Speaker 1: When did it start? How long have people been doing
Speaker 1: it as art too? I know I've seen some like
Speaker 1: beautiful spiral slits. What's going on with that?
Speaker 3: It's like all good engineering, it's both decorative and also functional.
Speaker 3: So when when you put bread in the oven, as
Speaker 3: I said before, bread is like a foam, you know,
Speaker 3: you're really like, you know, you're like froth farming, and
Speaker 3: all the microbes in the bread, whether it's commercially East
Speaker 3: or wild east or anything, have farted out co two
Speaker 3: into the dough, and the gluten in the dough or
Speaker 3: if you're making gluten free you know your xanthum gum
Speaker 3: or whatever you're using to give it elasticity, what you're
Speaker 3: really doing is making a ton of little balloons inside
Speaker 3: the dough and they're filling with the gas that the
Speaker 3: microbes are are pooping out or farting out, and this
Speaker 3: causes the bread to rise, and it's kind of cool
Speaker 3: because it rises everywhere at the same time at the
Speaker 3: same rate. This, by the way, is exactly analogous to
Speaker 3: the way that the universe expanded. But I don't want
Speaker 3: to digress now, Okay, when you make, what you're really
Speaker 3: doing is you're trying to freeze that into into positions
Speaker 3: so that you have like a solid object. Now, because
Speaker 3: the dough is obviously like all squishy when it's when
Speaker 3: it's rising and when you put it in the oven,
Speaker 3: it comes down and it's solid. But in the oven,
Speaker 3: when the when that CO two heats up, it expands. Okay,
Speaker 3: everybody in high school should have learned the ideal gas
Speaker 3: lot PV equals n our team. What it basically said
Speaker 3: as all things being equal, if you heat up a gas,
Speaker 3: it expands. And that's what happens to the little pockets
Speaker 3: of CO two of yeast farts inside your dough. They
Speaker 3: all expand, and so that the loaf expands and pops
Speaker 3: up inside the oven. And what will happen if you
Speaker 3: don't have places that you've slashed on the surface of
Speaker 3: the bread for that expansion to take place, is that
Speaker 3: your your loaf is going to rip open, and that's cool,
Speaker 3: that's cool and kind of free jazz, you know, and
Speaker 3: it's like, you know, it's going to be weird. But
Speaker 3: if you want to control that and have it look
Speaker 3: you know, sort of professional and adult and all that,
Speaker 3: people have developed, you know, you know, really sophisticated ways
Speaker 3: to introduce faults basically fault lines on the surface of
Speaker 3: the bread so that it splits open in a predictable way.
Speaker 3: And so that's what people are really doing. And if
Speaker 3: you if you get a lot of practice with it,
Speaker 3: then you can control how it opens up and make
Speaker 3: you know, really beautiful designs. But you know, at its
Speaker 3: most fundamental level, if you don't want the thing ripped open,
Speaker 3: and also, to be honest, if you want the bread
Speaker 3: to have really good texture, if you want the crumb
Speaker 3: to be nice, you want to make sure to relieve
Speaker 3: that stress so that all the bubbles can continue to expand,
Speaker 3: because if in part of your loaf they can't expand
Speaker 3: like they want because they're constricted, then you're going to
Speaker 3: have dense bread there and you don't want you don't
Speaker 3: want dense bread, so you want to relieve that stress.
Speaker 3: So that's basically the deal. And learning to do that
Speaker 3: slashing and learning how to make your dough so that
Speaker 3: the outer layer when you're ready to put it in
Speaker 3: the oven, is a little bit drier than the inside
Speaker 3: so that it takes those slash marks in a way
Speaker 3: that you can control better. Is part of the skill
Speaker 3: of learning how to make really good bread.
Speaker 1: So those bread slashes side note are called scoring. And
Speaker 1: Shamus has some guidelines for how many to do. Essentially,
Speaker 1: make your decorative gashes add up to the length of
Speaker 1: the loaf total to give some expanding room as it cooks,
Speaker 1: and he makes says about a quarter inch to a
Speaker 1: half an inch deep and with a razor blade, but
Speaker 1: likely a knife or a very long toenail will probably do.
Speaker 1: I don't know your situation, Ezrae wants to know. Can
Speaker 1: you need bread dough too much? Or is it better
Speaker 1: to overneaed or underneath.
Speaker 3: It is that's an interesting question. So you know, it's
Speaker 3: hard to imagine over kneading bread. Usually when people get
Speaker 3: really tense about kneading bread, they're really what they're really
Speaker 3: doing is getting something else wrong. What you're doing when
Speaker 3: you're kneading is your aligning all of these like crazy
Speaker 3: long chains of molecules protein molecules inside of the bread
Speaker 3: so that they form better gas pockets. And so you're
Speaker 3: making it so that when the microbes, you know, fart
Speaker 3: out their gas, it stays around in the bread as
Speaker 3: opposed to just like venting off and then your.
Speaker 2: Bread doesn't rise.
Speaker 3: So you can actually have a ton of microbes like
Speaker 3: happily living and farting in a loaf. And if you
Speaker 3: don't have enough gluten, I don't have something in there
Speaker 3: that can make balloons, then all that CO two is
Speaker 3: just going to float away and you're gonna have a
Speaker 3: hockey puck. And so you know what you're doing in
Speaker 3: you're kneeding is you're you're trying to set that gluten
Speaker 3: up and distribute it so that it naturally forms bubbles.
Speaker 1: Listen, because this is the analogy that we all need.
Speaker 3: It's no different than if you remember when you're learning
Speaker 3: how to blow bubbles with a gum. There's a like
Speaker 3: super specific way that you need to learn how to
Speaker 3: like form it so that it's in the right kind
Speaker 3: of a sheet and it's the right thickness and then
Speaker 3: you blow on it makes a bubble. Kneading is essentially
Speaker 3: exactly like chewing that bubble gum, and there's not you
Speaker 3: don't have to need in the sort of conventional sense
Speaker 3: or in a bread machine, you know, a very effective technique,
Speaker 3: especially with the more you know, cranky grains that have
Speaker 3: less gluten, so it's really it's harder to get those
Speaker 3: bubbles to form. Is a technique of stretching. Some people
Speaker 3: call it no kneed bread. In fact, you have to
Speaker 3: need the no need bread once you're just doing you're
Speaker 3: stretching it, and that mechanical motion of these long molecules
Speaker 3: against each other aligns them and that turns out to
Speaker 3: be what it takes to make it so that the
Speaker 3: bubble can form successfully. Now there's way more than you
Speaker 3: ever wanted to know about that.
Speaker 2: That's amazing. It's like, oh, that's why you do it.
Speaker 1: Like the science of cooking makes makes it so much
Speaker 1: easier to adhere to those practices instead of lazily skipping steps.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's right.
Speaker 3: Human beings hate like being told to do something and
Speaker 3: not why, like no, you just do this, Yeah, but why, man?
Speaker 2: Why I need a reason?
Speaker 1: Alex Quinton wants to know why their starter, why their
Speaker 1: sourdough starter stops growing from day four, Like day three
Speaker 1: it's beautiful, doubles in size perfect, and then day four
Speaker 1: stops growing and they say, I feel like I keep
Speaker 1: doing it wrong, so I dump put in the bin
Speaker 1: and don't.
Speaker 3: Dump it in the band No, So it's a sour
Speaker 3: dough starter is like having billions of pets and some
Speaker 3: days they you know, pooh in the living room and
Speaker 3: that's just how it is. And don't don't you don't
Speaker 3: you don't throw away your dog because you know he
Speaker 3: does that, And don't throw away your starter. You know,
Speaker 3: it goes up and down. And I think that, you know,
Speaker 3: part of part of the issue here is the you know,
Speaker 3: Instagram poisoning of people who show these like you know,
Speaker 3: banging starters in these jars. And again like you know,
Speaker 3: anybody who does wild starters and feeds them, you know,
Speaker 3: grains knows that those pictures of garbage and lies. So
Speaker 3: don't beat yourself up, you know, just keep feeding it.
Speaker 3: And a few important things about about starter cultures. First
Speaker 3: of all, as as the microbes eat the food and
Speaker 3: they extreete excrete whatever they can excrete. They pooh, it's
Speaker 3: CO two, latic acid alcohol, you know, whatever it is.
Speaker 3: It's a big mix of things based on whatever is
Speaker 3: in your sample. Just like you wouldn't want to, you know,
Speaker 3: sleep in your bed, if you pooed in your bed.
Speaker 3: They don't want to do that. It's not good for them.
Speaker 3: And so when you pour half off, really pour half
Speaker 3: off like b you have to be really brutal and
Speaker 3: you have to replace it with fresh flour and fresh
Speaker 3: water because the pH changes, you know, the CO two
Speaker 3: changes the pH and makes it more acidic in there,
Speaker 3: and that's bad for them. It will cause them to
Speaker 3: grow more slowly. So you have to be really careful
Speaker 3: and replace that quite a bit. And you know, if
Speaker 3: it's you know, slowing down, you can feed it two
Speaker 3: or three times a day. It's no big deal and
Speaker 3: sometimes you won't even see a difference. But you have
Speaker 3: to understand the microbes are in there, and unless you've
Speaker 3: killed them with heat or your roommate is a total
Speaker 3: dick and has like poured bleach in there or something,
Speaker 3: it's not dead. And believe me, you know, if we
Speaker 3: can amplify you know, a few east molecules from a
Speaker 3: five thousand year old pot into bread. You know you can.
Speaker 3: There's no way that you've killed all but like two
Speaker 3: molecules or yeast cells in your starter. So don't don't
Speaker 3: give up in your starter. Come on, man, have some sympathy.
Speaker 3: Don't don't be a monster.
Speaker 1: And you met, you know, you mentioned the old bread
Speaker 1: and Obli asked, what are the ancients put.
Speaker 2: On their bread?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 1: Did butter exist? What kind of oils? Did they smear
Speaker 1: it with the heini yogurt?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: How was it eaten?
Speaker 1: And did you adhere that when you first made your
Speaker 1: ancient loaf? Oh?
Speaker 3: Right? So wow? A few things. First, of all fats,
Speaker 3: so I have I'm the proud owner of a of
Speaker 3: a vast library of different ancient animal fats. I've tried
Speaker 3: baking and seasoning pots and using them for all sorts
Speaker 3: of different things from I know, beef tallow to goose
Speaker 3: fat to lamb fat, flax oil, all sorts of different
Speaker 3: plant oil, and they all make good bread. In fact,
Speaker 3: I have to be honest with you, the pork fat
Speaker 3: bread is ridiculously awesome.
Speaker 4: Real.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, And this was all because you know, we
Speaker 3: were trying to figure out what fats the might have
Speaker 3: been around in the Old Kingdom because you know, there
Speaker 3: wasn't like a recipe. People would have used the fats
Speaker 3: at hand, and there were a lot of waterfowl used
Speaker 3: for food in the in the Old Kingdom, and also
Speaker 3: surprisingly a lot of beef. And so you know, we
Speaker 3: tried all those things out and they all work and
Speaker 3: they're they're quite good. The ancient Egyptians also put various
Speaker 3: spices into the bread. The bread that I make, I
Speaker 3: put roasted coriander in because we find that in all
Speaker 3: the mass spectroscopy studies of Old Kingdom and Gisa bread,
Speaker 3: it's very common thing for them to add. And when
Speaker 3: that bread comes out of the oven. And remember that
Speaker 3: in these cultures people ate bread as a main food stuff.
Speaker 3: It wasn't like what they had for breakfast, and they
Speaker 3: weren't making like avocado toast with it. It was their
Speaker 3: main food stuff. These were peasants, so they eat it
Speaker 3: right away. So the loaf didn't last. There wasn't like
Speaker 3: day old bread, right And when you get this loaf
Speaker 3: out of the hole in the ground and you take
Speaker 3: the thing off and you let it cool for a bit,
Speaker 3: it does not need any topic. It just it doesn't
Speaker 3: need it, and so it's a satisfying meal in itself.
Speaker 3: Now that said, the ancient Egyptians ora notorious for eating onions.
Speaker 3: In fact, the three things we always see in funere
Speaker 3: offerings are bread, beer, and onions, which always causes me
Speaker 3: to think that, like, I don't want to be in
Speaker 3: a small room with an ancient addition. But I'm guessing
Speaker 3: that you would have had this bread with coriander in
Speaker 3: it and some onions fried in duck fat. Got it,
Speaker 3: And that's and I've done that, and that's really exceptionally
Speaker 3: good food.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: Seamus has also stepped up his gastro egyptology game by
Speaker 1: experimenting cooking the ancient starter dough in these conical vessels
Speaker 1: in a pit of hot coals to more authentically replicate
Speaker 1: ancient loaves. And I feel like this is not the
Speaker 1: work of an amateur. This is a professional gastro egyptologist.
Speaker 1: But coming up, he puts it all in perspective, so
Speaker 1: his precision comes from play and from passion. So this
Speaker 1: should be fun after all, you should like this.
Speaker 2: What about the last couple of questions?
Speaker 1: I always ask any flimplam that you want to debunk,
Speaker 1: any myths about bread startering, bread bread starters, sourdough starters
Speaker 1: that you wish people knew.
Speaker 3: Wow, so many, But well, the main thing is just that,
Speaker 3: you know, this is a very ancient thing and people
Speaker 3: who knew nothing about biology or the internet could do
Speaker 3: this better than we ever will. So the key thing
Speaker 3: about sourdough is to just let the fuck go, stop
Speaker 3: overthinking it, and just work on it. You know, this
Speaker 3: is a it's a skill, not a recipe.
Speaker 1: That's a good You need bumper stickers, you need to
Speaker 1: sell merch. I know people want to buy your starter,
Speaker 1: to your ancient starter, and it's like, uh uh.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, there are two reasons for that. The first
Speaker 3: one is we're in the middle of the research, and
Speaker 3: the second one is, like I said, it doesn't belong
Speaker 3: to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think that's beautiful. What is something that
Speaker 1: annoys you the most about the process of bread making?
Speaker 1: What's the most irksome? What's the crappiest or the most
Speaker 1: tedious or vexing element of baking bread or breaking or
Speaker 1: baking old bread?
Speaker 3: You mean, aside from just being me right, Well, so
Speaker 3: that there are two obvious stands out that the standouts,
Speaker 3: the first one is that you know, I mill all
Speaker 3: my own flours, so I have like these bags of
Speaker 3: grain that show up in my house. And milling flour
Speaker 3: is hard. It's hard work and it's loud and it
Speaker 3: makes a mess. Then I have to do it a lot.
Speaker 3: Second thing is that I'm incredibly careful to maintain the
Speaker 3: sterility the non contamination of these samples, and so, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, feeding my starter takes me half an hour. Uh,
Speaker 3: and I do it every day, and that's just a
Speaker 3: lot of time and effort. That is a pain in
Speaker 3: the ass. And it's part of the reason I apologize
Speaker 3: to everybody who's that I'm so cranky. And people say, well,
Speaker 3: how do you know? I heard that sour dough starters
Speaker 3: get contaminated by the flower that you feed them and
Speaker 3: that they change based on it. And I'm like, oh,
Speaker 3: I just have no patience after spending half an hour
Speaker 3: with a fucking autoclaven you'vy lights the stereo gloves every day, Like, oh,
Speaker 3: you shut the fuck up. Read the thread.
Speaker 2: Maybe you're just angry.
Speaker 3: Could be I could be it. I need some I
Speaker 3: need some some some onions in goose fat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what about your favorite thing, your favorite thing
Speaker 1: about baking, your favorite thing about bread, the thing that
Speaker 1: gives you the butterflies the most.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was a moment where I was after I
Speaker 3: had finished milling flour one day, and I have these
Speaker 3: big sort of outsized jars, Mason jars that I put
Speaker 3: the milled flour in, and I label them with a date.
Speaker 3: And you know, after I sterilized flower, I label it
Speaker 3: sterilized with the date on it because I've got a
Speaker 3: good lab technique, because I'm a particle physicist and I
Speaker 3: was trained when like there were machines that could trivially
Speaker 3: kill you if you aren't here. And I found myself
Speaker 3: I'm gonna actually get for clempt to this by one
Speaker 3: day I did, like six weeks ago. I finished milling
Speaker 3: and I was writing emmer on the jar and I
Speaker 3: looked over and I realized that I had written it
Speaker 3: in hieroglyphs and I didn't even know.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: And I felt like I felt like I was there.
Speaker 3: I felt like I was I felt like I was
Speaker 3: a worthy human being. I was. I was communing with
Speaker 3: my elders, my ancestors. It was really special.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Shoot, I was tearing up too, Okay, I'm going to
Speaker 1: use my all my tears to make a sour dough starter.
Speaker 3: There you go, that's right, raised on the tears of
Speaker 3: podcast hosts.
Speaker 2: No, it's really that's really special. That's really amazing.
Speaker 1: I want to look up how how that's actually written
Speaker 1: in hieroglyphs. That's really really interesting.
Speaker 3: The word is bettett.
Speaker 1: I looked up the hieroglyph for emmer wheat, and it
Speaker 1: looks like a foot, a hand, a loaf, and a
Speaker 1: little shaft of wheat. And it's just amazing to think
Speaker 1: of how many people, over how many years have seen
Speaker 1: and read that.
Speaker 3: You got all this garbage about the Pyramids being built
Speaker 3: by aliens and mysterious technologies and all this, and and
Speaker 3: you know, there's a there's a there's a quarry where
Speaker 3: stone was taken for the for the pyramids, and in
Speaker 3: one corner of it you can you can go and
Speaker 3: I don't know if you can see this or not,
Speaker 3: but I've seen pictures of it. There's a little drawing
Speaker 3: that one of the stonemason's made of his friend, and
Speaker 3: and it's this picture of a guy holding holding a
Speaker 3: chisel with a hammer, and and he's got kind of
Speaker 3: a big Nose and over it is written Big Nose,
Speaker 3: And isn't it Isn't it so much more impressive that
Speaker 3: those incredible structures were built by Big Nose and his
Speaker 3: friends than it is than it is by aliens? But
Speaker 3: isn't it? Just isn't that enough? Isn't it enough that
Speaker 3: they were able to do that? Why? Why do we
Speaker 3: need aliens?
Speaker 1: I think what you're doing of getting people interested in
Speaker 1: the history and the culture of it and the people
Speaker 1: and slowing down and trying to do it themselves. I
Speaker 1: think that's really cool. I mean, in a time like
Speaker 1: this that sucks. I mean, it's it's great that you're
Speaker 1: doing this. There's a lot of people that will have
Speaker 1: so much more appreciation. So whow that a particle physicist
Speaker 1: and a guy who designed the Xbox would be the
Speaker 1: one in a crisis to help us slow down and
Speaker 1: relax and stay inside and get back to basics. The simulation, Man,
Speaker 1: it throws us some curveballs, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: Do you want to know? Like a weird truly weird,
Speaker 3: like uh like conspiracy theory kind of thing that's right
Speaker 3: in front of our faces. But that's so fucking weird
Speaker 3: At the same time that it's too weird to even
Speaker 3: think about.
Speaker 2: No, what is it?
Speaker 3: If you go look at the Xbox logo? Okay, it's
Speaker 3: a loaf of bread. No, I'm telling you go look
Speaker 3: at it. It's a fucking soured loaf.
Speaker 2: Who designed that?
Speaker 1: Was that? You?
Speaker 3: So the original logo for the for our for the
Speaker 3: first one was different from that. This is what they
Speaker 3: came up with after I left.
Speaker 2: Ah, it's a bull.
Speaker 3: It's a fucking bull. It's crazy, isn't that insane? So
Speaker 3: that so that's a little creepy, that's a that's a
Speaker 3: little mysterious.
Speaker 1: And you know that's a little bearn stain bears just.
Speaker 3: A little bit. Yeah, that's a little bit x files
Speaker 3: right there.
Speaker 1: So ask smart people stupid questions. Ask sweet people sour
Speaker 1: dough questions because they have knowledge to spare and bread
Speaker 1: is tasty. We're all in this together to stay in
Speaker 1: and smooth down and maybe reframe and tell the people
Speaker 1: we love that we love them, that we loaf them.
Speaker 1: You can follow Seamus Blackley on Twitter there's a link
Speaker 1: in the show notes, and also follow egyptologists doctor Serena
Speaker 1: Love and Richard Bowman, the microbiologist. They're also linked Kieran
Speaker 1: Danacci came up with the word gastro Egyptology.
Speaker 2: Thank you for that.
Speaker 1: We are at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Ali
Speaker 1: Ward with one l on both and a ton of links,
Speaker 1: including to Seamus's threads, are up at aliyward dot com
Speaker 1: slash ologies slash gastro Egyptology and bleeped episodes and transcripts
Speaker 1: are up at aliward dot com slash Ologies dash extras
Speaker 1: link in the show notes.
Speaker 2: Thank you too.
Speaker 1: Professional transcriptionist Emily White and her army of volunteers in
Speaker 1: the Ologies Transcribers Facebook group.
Speaker 2: I see you, I love you all.
Speaker 1: Thank you for what you do. Ology's merch is available
Speaker 1: at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Shannon Feltis and Bonnie
Speaker 1: Dutch sisters who hosts the comedy podcast You are That
Speaker 1: for managing that. Thank you Aaron Talbert for wrangling the
Speaker 1: Ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to each and every
Speaker 1: patron for submitting questions and being just the anchor of
Speaker 1: the show. Thank you to Travis and Miles. Congrats on
Speaker 1: your new sourdough starter. I want to hear what it's named.
Speaker 1: Happy birthday to my niece Olivia and my good pal
Speaker 1: Colleen flanagain. Assistant editing was done by the wonderful Jared Sleeper,
Speaker 1: who does quarantine calistenics every day at noon Pacific time,
Speaker 1: sometimes in character in a red long John onesie and
Speaker 1: a floppy hat, calling himself an old timey gold prospector
Speaker 1: by the name of Antoine Calvin de Boovie who's avenging
Speaker 1: his nemesis Silvertongue Jack for stealing his biscuits and bacon
Speaker 1: workouts in those themes. Those are up on his Instagram.
Speaker 1: Jared Dash Sleeper get into it, and of course thank
Speaker 1: you to lead editor and host of the kiddie themed
Speaker 1: per cast and the dino themed Sea Jurassic Right, stephen
Speaker 1: Ry Morris.
Speaker 2: We couldn't do it without you.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. Theme song was written by Nick Thorburn of
Speaker 1: the band Islands and if you listen to the end,
Speaker 1: you know I tell you a secret. And this week
Speaker 1: I was very excited to interview Seamus and a total.
Speaker 2: Boyfriend, Jarrett.
Speaker 1: I was like, I'm talking to the sourdough expert. He
Speaker 1: also invented the Nintendo PS four. He thought I was
Speaker 1: joking and I wasn't, and he paused and Jarrett got
Speaker 1: on his discord chat with his gamer dude friends and
Speaker 1: told them what I had said, and then I heard
Speaker 1: them all laugh on speakerphone, and they continued to roast me,
Speaker 1: just ruthlessly, and I deserve it. So apparently Xbox is
Speaker 1: not a Nintendo or a PS four. I was just
Speaker 1: thrown around words. I don't know the difference. Now I do,
Speaker 1: but yes, look it up. The Xbox logo very much
Speaker 1: looks like a sour dough goosebumps.
Speaker 4: All right, I bought to go.
Speaker 2: Stay safe.
Speaker 1: You're doing great out there, okay. Packidermatology, hobiology for dose, zoology, lithology, zoology, meteorology, seratology, thepology, ceiology, semology.
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