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eiriee asked: Hey Lottie, have you heard about that guy, Seamus Blackley, who got yeast from the inside of an ancient Egyptian beaker and made sourdough starter and baked bread with it? I think it's so cool we can have a somewhat-direct connection to humanity from so long ago, through food. It reminds me of when I baked bread on April 19th just because some Roman guy did once and wrote it down, but with added microbiology!
thatlittleegyptologist answered:

I have yes! Several people have messaged me about it over the last 24 hrs and I’ve been too drained to actually respond properly to people or to talk about it. But here’s a link for everyone to read up on it.

Seamus Blackley (who I’m pretty sure was one of the designers of the XBOX so double wtf), along, and I can’t stress this enough, with Egyptologist Dr Serena Love and Microbiologist Richard Bowman (who refers to himself as a Gastro-egyptologist) because the media keeps mentioning these two as an afterthought and they’re the scientists here, reactivated bread yeast from a 4500 year old Egyptian bread mould and made fresh sourdough bread with it. 

Twitter thread on the process by Seamus Blackley here

If you’re a bread nerd and want to know more about ancient bread go here

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