Ologies with Alie Ward - Gastroegyptology (BREAD BAKING) with Seamus Blackley

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

Sourdough starters! Ancient yeasts! Why we need/knead dough! And why you don't need to buy a starter to start. Polymath, particle physicist, inventor of the Xbox, and truly delightful fermentation nerd Seamus Blackley joins to chat about his kitchen adventures resurrecting dormant yeasts from 4,000 Egyptian baking vessels, plus wild yeasts, the infuriating myth of “yeast scarcity,” the beauty of everyday objects, the debt we owe our ancestors, the joy of getting to know your dough plus tons of tips for newbie and experienced bakers. The first half is all about the history of baking and yeasts and some hot Egyptian gossip, then we roll up our sleeves in the second half for how-tos. Forward this episode to anyone who bakes, who wants to bake, who lovingly feeds their jar of yeasts, who is intimidated by it or who just needs a lesson on how to slow down and enjoy the dormancy period we’re in right now. This episode’s got it all. Including some truly shameless bread puns. Follow Seamus @SeamusBlackley and here’s one recipe tutorial megathread: https://twitter.com/SeamusBlackley/status/1135328857660305408 Follow: Egyptologist Dr. Serena Love, microbiologist Richard Bowman @RBowman1234 and the coiner of “Gastroegyptology,” Kieran Donnachie A donation went to Boys and Girls Clubs of America: https://www.bgca.org Sponsor links: Sakara.com/ologies; Kiwico.com/ologies More links at alieward.com/ologies/gastroegyptology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and STIIIICKERS! Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's your grandfatherly neighbor who secretly waters your plants for you. Allie Ward, back with a fresh, hot, steamy, yeasty episode of oligies. We're all staying in and without hitting up the store for fresh bread, a lot of y'all have been rising to the occasion and baking at home. So this past week, I hunted down an oligist who can help make your bread troubles toast. I think you're gonna love it. But before that, thank you to all the patrons at patreon.com slash oligies for supporting the show.

Right now, podcasters are lucky to work from their closets. But recording remotely is a giant pain in the hot buns and it costs more to deal with in post. So thank you for supporting patrons. Happy birthday on April 17th to Stephen Ray Morris. Everyone wish him a happy one on Friday. Thank you to everyone wearing items from oligiesmerch.com. Every person telling a friend or sending an episode around rating, subscribing, all of

those are life changers. And of course, reviewing on iTunes and to honor and embarrass someone each week, I pick a fresh one. This week, thank you AKP who says that they bought an iPad just so they can finally give me a review. That was way too kind. Also, I hope that you use it for Pinteresting some bread recipes because you're gonna want them.

Also, thank you to Lut Norse who left a review for stars saying crude language. This would be a fabulous podcast, but the crude language by the host is a stopper for kids hearing it. Clean it up. Thanks. Lut Norse, I hear you. And surprise, there are free bleeped episodes. Safe for kids.

You've been up there for years. They're at alleyward.com on the oligies extra page. It's linked in the show notes. Have at it. I'm sorry. Heads up. There are some very enthusiastic curses in this episode. It's a hell of a ride.

You have no idea what you're in for. Okay. First off, gastroegyptology. Is this a real word? It is now. So as of July 28th, 2019, more on that story in a bit. But gastro comes from the Greek for stomach and Egypt is a duh. So eating Egypt, getting Egypt in our bellies.

So this self-proclaimed amateur gastroegyptologist made global headlines last summer. He tweeted about his experiments resurrecting a 4,000-year-old Egyptian yeast captured from ancient pottery. Is he a professional baker? Nope. This wacky genius is a true polymath. His accomplishments are varied. They're all astounding.

He studied particle physics. He's been a video game producer. He's widely known as the father of the Xbox. That's right. He made the Xbox. He was a Hollywood agent at CAA representing video game artists and he's now a tech CEO. He also loves to bake and I'm going to let him tell the tales of his international triumphs in the world of yeast starters.

So we were introduced via Twitter and we're only a few towns away but we socially distance. We spoke remotely as the LA rain drizzled and I got hungrier every minute. Now the first half of this episode will make you appreciate bread in ways you never have before, in ways Oprah never has before. It's chewy with history and culture and context and a meditative appreciation just for life no matter how wack it feels. That is the why. And then the last half of the episode is the how, the very delicious DIY of bread.

How to culture yeast from thin air, naming a starter, how long it takes to make bread, what kind of flour to use, what to do if you kill a starter, how to be a yeast daddy and the analog chill of taking a grain and letting it fuel you. With physicist, video game godfather and amateur gastro-egyptologist Seamus Blackley. And when I clicked over to your Twitter profile and saw that you were an amateur gastro-egyptologist, I was like, that's an ology, we're doing this. So how did you come to call yourself that, by the way, how long have you been owning that as a title?

Well, that was actually suggested by somebody on Twitter who said, you know, gastro-egyptology and so we sort of very politely asked him, could we use that to describe this? And he said, as long as you make sure, as a disclaimer, to say that it was suggested sarcastically. So, okay. So, yes, it was sarcastically suggested. One should never take it seriously. And there you have it.

Well, you know, I'm an amateur gastro-egyptologist and it may be that there actually are no professional gastro-egyptologists yet, but you know, I'm hoping in the future that a huge army of them. Well, I kind of disagree because you call yourself an amateur, but I feel like if you're the only person in the world who is doing it at a pretty high level, like, are you an amateur? Really? You know, I mean, I'm not getting paid for it. That's for sure.

So, you know, really, if I could get, like, you know, a grant or something, I suppose that then I could remove that. But you know, I mean, look, I have a day job. I'm the CEO of this, you know, very stealthy tech startup and that's more than a full-time job. And so this is the thing I used to do on Sunday mornings that's grown like the, you know, like the monster out of some 1950s, like science fiction movie into, you know, a city-destroying monster.

And, you know, I still am not quite sure myself what exactly the hell is going on. So. Well, that was my first question for you in my notes. It just says your backstory. What the fuck? Like, okay, you're a physicist, but you're also a video game engineer. You're the father of the Xbox. You were an agent at CAA.

Like what, your life, how did you do all of these things? And what were you always interested in growing up? One way to think of it is as, you know, a kind of a profound lack of a career or, you know, a profound lack of direction in one's life. That would be the sort of stern uncle way to talk about it. But I think, you know, the other hand of that is just that I'm really interested in basically everything. So there's some aspect of like doing whatever is in front of you that looks cool.

Do you just, when you get into something, are you just so passionate about it, you just kind of go down a wormhole? Yeah. I mean, that, you know, I think that the universe is so magnificently interesting and beautiful and profound. And even the smallest things, there's so much complexity and beauty. It seems like a crime to ignore it or to walk by it. It really does to me.

And so I have this kind of fear of missing out of like everything. And I think that really is a powerful thing for me, you know, just walking around and noticing things. There's just so much beauty. I mean, it's remarkable to me. Oh, you thought this episode was just about bread? No. Buckle up.

Prepare for some real heartfelt shit. And do you think that partly why you started baking was that something where you kind of were slowing down and working with your hands since you work digitally a lot or in tech? Or when did you kind of get into that? That was kind of the idea, right? And that's part of why it's so weird to think or it was so strange to find myself, you know, you know, at Harvard, you know, doing biological sampling of really ancient, like priceless artifacts when it was supposed to be the relaxing thing I was going to do to get away from research

on, you know, Sunday morning. So what does it mean? But I think that that, you know, realistically, and I think it's probably true for everyone that to really reset your mind, to kind of clear your conceptual palate, you have to distract your brain with something else. I asked if he knew when he first started baking. Yeah, I can't. Well, I can't remember.

My mother was this sort of perennially amateur kind of chef and she loved cooking and sometimes it was even good. But she, you know, her heart was really in it and I started to be interested for reasons I couldn't understand in the baking of bread. And in college and in a graduate school, I would occasionally go through phases where I'd, you know, get it in my mind that I was going to bake some bread and it came out variously good and bad. Sheamus says that he ended up working with someone on an optics job who inherited a wheat

field and the folks on their engineering team would bake sourdough from the family farm grains. And I thought, God, you know, in terms of nerdiness, that's pretty good. And maybe I should learn how to do that. And you know, because it's like, it's like, you know, what your physics or math or engineering brain does with anything, you know, you look at it and you dissect it and you want to find its purest part and its purest form and you want to find challenge in it and find ways to challenge yourself.

You know, I think. And so a lot of engineers and scientists end up baking sourdough because of, I think a few things. First of all, it's really interesting, technically, you know, you have this kind of somewhat random biological sample. And it does an amazing thing, you know, it transforms powdered grass seed into the foundation of civilization. Yeah.

Okay. And that's incredible. But it does it in a really kind of wistful, uncontrollable, kind of naughty way. You know, it's not predictable. You don't know what's in it. You don't know how it's going to take based on, you know, the humidity in the air and the temperature and a million other things that maybe you can control and maybe you can't. The behavior of this stuff is different, but it turns out, I think this is really lucky

for like our species. It turns out that almost any screw up or or or half right way to bake natural bread like this, you know, is delicious and nourishing. So your village will survive no matter how bad you are at it with human beings like being you know, being here, because you can grow this grass, which grows easily. Okay. And you get the seeds off it and you can make this food and the grain lasts a long time. You can store the seeds and it lasts for a really long time.

And then when you need it, you can kind of grind it up and make this stuff with it that feeds everybody. And people don't die. Like they turns out to have enough protein and enough amino acids in it and enough micronutrients and starches and sugars and all these things that human beings need. It just turns out to have that. It's kind of miraculous. And you know, when you think about is there life on other planets and in the universe

and all of that, you know, how lucky do you have to be to find something like that? And it's got all sorts of additional benefits too. Like I have come to firmly believe that the fact that you can make beer at the same time as making bread is also hugely important in human civilization because all of the people who need to go do all this heavy labor, you know, to farm and to harvest and to winnow and all of that, you can tell them, hey, if you go do all this work so the village survives, we'll also make some beer. And so it's like the lubricant that makes all the other hard work happen.

So yeah, it's really lucky that you can collect out of the air that even if you just leave, you know, some of this grass seed around and mix it with water, it's going to start bubbling up. And if you if you kind of, you know, freeze those bubbles by putting it in an oven or getting it hot, you get this satisfying yummy stuff that stops your kids from dying. Really super lucky. I'm really lucky. And so I got, I started to think about all of that and I thought, gosh, you know, like

a really good interesting challenge would be to figure out if I was, you know, as smart as, you know, your average 12 year old in the 1400s and I could make, you know, bread out of just grass seed or what the new would be. And so I started screwing around with that and collecting yeast and it turns out that it was really delicious. You realize that maybe ancient foods weren't gross, maybe we just lost the skill of cooking the ingredients right. And agrarian societies, just side note, emerged about 10,000 years ago and being able to stay

in one place and have more reliable food sources is cited as a huge advancement toward the current industrial age and all because fermented, more aerated bread was fluffier, tastier and more nutritious. So how do yeasts elevate it, if you will, like that? The microorganisms that cause bread to rise, that makes CO2 and also make the alcohols that give it its flavor, you know, they're natural animals. They live on the grain, you know, it's not like, it's not like yeast exists because we started making bread.

No, I mean, the yeast has been there for a really long time and it eats the grain. And when we started to make gruel out of this stuff, the theory goes, the gruel started to bubble if you left it out long enough. And if you left it out long enough and you heated it, you would make bread. And if you left it out long enough covered, the yeast would start to run out of air and yeast can respirate and feed both aerobically and anaerobically, meaning with or without oxygen. And when it respirates aerobically, it makes CO2, which is the farts that make bubbles

in bread and make bread soft. It smells so good. When it respirates or when it eats anaerobically, it poops out alcohol, which is the spirit. So if you leave it covered, then you get a boozy kind of a thing. And that's pretty good. I mean, people definitely would have taken notice of that. So you mean I'm drunk? You know, this relationship between humans and fermentation starts.

And it's hard to know what those primitive people thought of it, but they certainly kept the tradition going. And by the time that cultures like the Egyptians, Sumerian cultures show up, they're already from the start, experts at brewing and baking. And did you already know a lot of this stuff earlier? Did you always like Egyptology? And how did you partner up with like Dr. Serena Love? She's the Egyptologist that helped you actually nab this yeast.

Were you already in the Egyptology scene? Were you like in the group chats? Were you hanging out on the Reddit forums? Oh, God, no. All of this replaced like useful knowledge that I used to have, but I don't have any. Well, I've always been a fan of Egyptology and I mean, like anyone, I mean, how can you not be? It's like dinosaurs.

You know, if you don't like it, then something's wrong and we need to take you to see the nice man who's going to ask you questions about your emotions, right? The thing that happened to me was that when I was in college, I had to take a distribution requirement. One of the options that was available was actually Egyptian hieroglyphics. And yeah, it was cool. And the teacher was actually an Egyptologist at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which is where I ended up doing some sampling last summer.

And the final exam for this class was actually going to the museum and translating stuff off of actual objects, which was so cool. Oh, my God. Well, and even cooler than that, and I think this is lost on a lot of people, you can read those words and you can you can know what's in the minds of our ancestors thousands of years ago. So what kind of mysteries do you unfurl when you translate hieroglyphics? I bet mysterious, deep ones, right?

Seamus explains. And the other thing that that I think people miss out on is that it's not some sort of weird, formal thing like you see in movies, you know, it's a lot of like, hey, so, you know, Senorset's sister is dating that the overseer on the work crew. And we know her crew is getting 50 percent more than we are. And we demand that you change that. Like it's stuff like that. Or like, you know, so-and-so's wife is sleeping with like so-and-so.

And so I made a wax crocodile in the hope that it would come to life under his bed. You know, I like this is and these stories are tremendous. And you suddenly get to know these people and they were hilarious. And their language is written down in these hieroglyphs. And some of them are, you know, pictures of things. And so they made ponds with them and they had a certain kind of humor. And they were so smart and so successful. And, you know, their civilization lasted 5,000 years.

I mean, it lasted longer than it's been since it ended. Oh, my God. You know, they were extraordinary. And I came to realize what an extraordinary civilization this wasn't. And yet how how close to them we are and how much we owe them. So Seamus says he started to realize what a debt we owe to the ancient Egyptians, not just for carbs, but for the way that they understood medicine and architecture and how essentially the Greeks revered them and bit their style.

And then the Romans copied the Greeks. So the Egyptians are like your smart friends whose paper you copied. They were the nerds as well as the Hotties and the ones that you should not challenge to a fight. Ancient Egypt was called Kemet to the Egyptians. And was it was the capital and was it is actually the name of the ceremonial mace that the Pharaoh would brain his enemy with. OK, so that's the name of the capital. And you go to go to was it and the pyramids were there.

And they were smooth and white because they were covered in in very precisely cut limestone that was actually taken off of them by the Arab invaders who are the modern Egyptians and used to build Cairo. And and so it was fantastically intimidating. And the Pharaoh was the ruler of the known world. I feel like Egypt's Egyptians were like the first Instagram influencers, like everyone looked up to them. And now that's just you just being so extra, so extra in breadmaking.

No, it is totally true. They were, you know, that you can look at the temples at Karnak in places and that you see the pharaohs and it was total Instagram. They'd like have huge pictures of themselves and then descriptions of all the stuff that they had done. And this is his famous one actually of Ramsey's the second Ramsey's the great, who is probably the Pharaoh from the Bible. And he had he had this big military expedition early in his reign

and he got his ass kicked and handed to him. Right. But if you look at it, if you look at the the inscriptions and pictures of this and Karnak, this huge temple complex, like his advertising for himself, what it shows is a series of epic victories, each one just a little bit closer to home. So great. So great. I love that being a petty bitch has just been like it's in our DNA and who we are. So Seamus got into all this history and a hunger arose. Learning all of this, which was really news to me because, you know,

the programmer, physicist guy was really powerful. And one day a few years ago, I guess less than that, maybe two years ago, a friend of mine, who I know from the video game industry, who's a famous beer brewer, sent me a sample of some brewing yeast that had that that was purportedly, you know, scraped from some ancient Egyptian pots and various companies, brewing companies had made, you know, ancient Egyptian beer with this stuff. But what if you tried baking with it?

Wait, stupid question. Can you bake with beer yeast? Well, yeah, it's all the same. It's all the stuff. Yeah, I know that beer and bread are really the right and left hand of the same thing. OK, they really are. Like I said before, you know, just in one case, you know, in bread, you introduce a lot of air into the dough. And it doesn't you don't and you don't take that long. You take maybe, you know, half a day or 18 hours.

If you're really crazy and trying to get really sour sour dough. So you don't give the the yeast really a lot of time to to respirate anaerobically. So that doesn't make a lot of alcohol, but it makes a lot of CO2, which is what you want to leaven the bread, right? Yeah. When you make beer, you you seal it up and you get the yeast to make alcohol. OK, and just a quick side note, if you missed the zymology episode

on fermentation and beer, yeasts are a fungus and they're single celled. And humans have been using them in food and drinks for thousands of years, starting in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. So you can see them under a microscope under 400 times the power. But it wasn't until 1857 when microbiologists and Frenchman and father of the rabies vaccine, Louis Pasteur, figured out that it was yeast and not just chemistry that made bread rise and beer bubble up.

1857, that's when they figured it out. Now, there's pretty much one common yeast used in baking and brewing with a ton of different strains, although there are a handful of other yeast that do that work too. For thousands of years, bread was just made with whatever yeasts were naturally present. And these little critters had more time to break down the grains and then rise up the dough. There wasn't any Fleischmann's yeast in the old kingdom.

You know, you didn't go to the supermarket and get your yeast out of the fridge. Yeah, you collected it out of the air or, you know, it came in with your flour. And or most likely, you know, you were taking some of your old dough or some of the some of the yeast froth that develops on the top of beer and using that. And so this friend of yours is like, yo, I got a hookup on some beer. So I got it. And it's old yeast. And I bake with it because, you know, it's right in line with everything

that I love, Egyptology and all this. And I think to myself, this is fantastic. Like now, in addition to knowing the minds of these people, maybe we could share a meal with them. Like that would be tremendous, you know? Yeah. You know, what would this be like? And so you use some research into what the grains were a little bit and I make this bread.

And, you know, I had been posting photographs of my, you know, my medieval baking adventures of like trying to collect yeast out of the air in different places and use different grains. And I had started sort of milling some some old grains, like milling rye, like central Europeans and trying to make, you know, medieval peasant bread, basically. And so I applied that technique to this Egyptian yeast and put pictures up. And, you know, I was used to, you know, getting a couple hundred likes or something.

Right. And, you know, like suddenly there were like millions of people watching this. Right. And I was like, what the hell is going on? And it was really tense, too, because I would send pictures like as I was baking during the day on Sunday, because it was relaxing. And suddenly this was no longer relaxing. This was like super tense, because now it's oh, shit, this has to come out. And and so the but but part of it was that people started asking questions like, how do you know this is ancient yeast?

Where did you get this from? Like, how do you know you're doing this the right way? How did they bake? Yeah. And I don't have any answers. And worst of all, my wife said, yeah, well, you know, they have a point. Come on, man. I found the most vocal critics, two of whom were Dr. Serena Love and Rich Bowman, who's a microbiologist at the University of Iowa.

And I said, all right, so you're right. So how would we fix it? How would you write? And that's where our little product was born. Well, he certainly leveled up from his sleepy Sunday bread sessions. And Seamus mentioned that there are still DNA and RNA analyses to do and they're working on it, given that it's pretty much like a side hustle passion project.

This is like gentlemanly science in the Victorian sense, right? Where we may be all professional scientists on other projects, but this is a little self funded project of our own. And so, you know, getting DNA analysis of yeast is complex. And we're doing it. And that's just really a disclaimer. What we we decided to do was take advantage of a couple of different things that are true about baking and natural yeast and ancient Egypt.

First is that yeast and a lot of the bacteria that make up natural leavening can hibernate. They can they can go to sleep. They can encapsulate themselves in various sensory ways and survive almost anything. People have taken yeast strains to space, expose them to vacuum in space and brought them back to earth and revive them. Yeast might be able to survive indefinitely long and dry it all the way out

and then give it water again and it comes back. So this dormant state is called quiescence. And it means essentially to rest or to snooze. I came across one microbiology paper called Sleeping Beauty, quiescence in saccharomyces cerevisiae. But how does it even chill that hard? And how long can it take a fungus nap? Nobody knows.

It may just be immortal, to be honest, and I'm not exaggerating. So that's important to know. The other thing is that the ancient Egyptians used ceramics kind of like plastic. There's a very technical term Egyptologists use, which is crapware. And crapware is the pottery that Egyptians made in huge quantities and would just toss away when it broke, then just make more because they're constantly making it. And you find piles of this stuff, apparently, on digs,

you know, like the size of houses of just broken pottery, of just a trash heap. If you find little cups for drinking and you find brewing and baking vessels and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, all of the brewing and baking vessels are candidates for us because this was all like terracotta. Terracotta, side note, is unglazed pottery. It's that ruddy, rough stuff. But it had what's called inclusions, which means basically animal poo and sand and stuff.

And what it meant was that these fired ceramics were porous and liquids could soak into them. And so the theory is, and I think it's true because we've done experiments on this and seen it, that the microbes that are in a beer or baking activity can soak into the ceramic matrix, into the little pores in the middle of the walls of these vessels, right, and they can dry out. And then you could throw the vessel away or bury it or whatever. And they're protected.

It's like a little time capsule inside the middle of the pottery. OK, when people say, oh, you know, we scraped some yeast off of the wall of a bakery or off, you know, off a pot, you know, I think you're just scraping modern dirt off, especially if it's in a museum, you know, it's whatever dirt it was buried in and, you know, whatever was in the museum for hundreds of years. But inside, really, you can imagine the sort of porous microstructure of this pottery where the yeast had had seeped in and the bacteria had gone to sleep.

They might still be there. And so Rich Bowen's idea was, could we do a kind of microbial fracking on that? Could we use a fluid filled with nutrients and amino acids, all the stuff that these organisms like, could we sort of flood a piece of ceramic with that or let it sit for a little while so that things wake up and start to sort of like let go of the surfaces that they're attached to and then vacuum them back up again and take them to the lab and see if we can revive them. OK, so this pottery is 4,000 years old and it was recovered from below

a temple in Giza near the base of the pyramids. And this plucky team of gastro-egyptologists were allowed to suck up the yeast from these pieces at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Peabody Museum at Harvard because their collection methods were non-invasive, so no scraping, no breaking it open. They actually do three levels of samplings. This is not for casual hobbyists. So a lot of thought is put into this and a very, you know, specific type of fluid

is used. And when we do this, it's in a very sterile, as much of a sterile environment as possible. Like I wear sterile garb and masks and gloves and stuff that's like normal today. Last summer, it was weird to see people dressed like this. Now you see people like that on the street, but fine. 2020 spring fashion. Yeah, in any case, that's how we end up sampling. And that was a protocol developed by Rich in answer to my question of, OK,

OK, smart guy, you want to you want to tell me I'm doing it wrong? How do we do it right? And that's only half the equation, because the other half is like, how the hell do you get anybody to let you do this? Yeah. And, you know, Dr. Love, I mean, she really took a bet on me not being a crazy person, whether on being the right kind of crazy person, I guess. And she put a reputation on the line with with a lot of, you know, really important people in the world of Egypt.

Apology that it was OK to talk to us and we wouldn't hurt anything. And this would be interesting. And what kind of pot exactly were you able to get access to? A lot of pots. And, you know, the pressure was really on for me because Serena had bet, you know, a lot of her reputation on this, as did Rich. And I would show up like, you know, you know, I'm a particle physicist. I don't know anything about this to, you know, to try to make good on this

and then to make sure that the result was treated respectfully. And but also get people excited about Egyptology. But anyway, that's an aside that the goal was to find the kinds of vessels that would have been infected with the culture. The beer and bread culture where it would have dried out. So vessels that beer was brewed in vessels that bread is needed in or rose in or where the dough was mixed.

And we had a lot of guesses. We even we sampled actually, you know, fossilized or preserved or dried out actual ceremonial loaves of bread that had been buried in the Old Kingdom, we tried a lot of different things. We have, you know, a lot of samples. All of them were categorized, you know, by where they were taken, when it was from, what the vessel was, which sample it was.

Rich then freezes some of each one. So we have a record forever. So that's sitting at like basically, you know, minus 80 degrees centigrade in a freezer in Iowa. And then he would feed some of them and develop them into colonies and select out the east and the bacteria. And the things were obviously modern and get rid of those. And then there are DNA and RNA extractions and further analysis.

So first come the lab coats, then come the aprons. And this is the Sunday morning hobby that everyone is looking for. Yeah, it sounds super relaxing. Super relaxing, no stress, really inexpensive. It's really DIY. Exactly, totally. I was thinking like, you know, learning how to make kombucha or maybe traveling all over the world during microbial sampling

of ancient Egyptian artifacts, one of the two. OK, so once you get a few of these sleepy little yeasties, what do you do? How do you make it a thriving, grinding, burping, farting fungus party? OK, here we go. We have the passion. We have the history. We have the context. So how do you start a starter?

How much yeast do you need to make a starter? Not very much, because what you do is you amplify it. You need not more than a few cells. I mean, that's that's the trick. And those cells are everywhere. I always say, and I've actually considered doing this, that you can probably bake bread using the yeast in the air in your car tires. Because yeast is just everywhere.

I mean, it's on everything. It is everywhere. Oh, yeah, yeast is just it's everywhere. It's hard to not collect it. And, you know, one of the funny things about the pandemic has been apparently, you know, apparently there's a shortage of baking yeast. And you see all these people saying that. Yeah, you see all these microbiologists responding on social media, like,

guys, there's no shortage of yeast. What the hell are you saying? So what you really want to do, what you really need to do is you need to amplify it so that you have, you know, enough yeast, like enough, you know, hundreds of billions of yeast cells to make a loaf of bread. And you just do that by feeding it. And it's actually pretty simple. And again, this goes back to like the luck that we have as a human race.

And this is so easy. So you just feed it flour because you want it to eat flour. So you have this jar of stuff and you keep feeding it flour and like pouring half off. And eventually everything that can't eat flour is in a dikes. It's starving, right? And the stuff that can eat flour is going to reproduce and reproduce and reproduce. Make huge, like amazing, like, you know, buffet orgy, right? And tell you have a lot of it in this jar and you're purifying it by doing this.

And that's really what raising a starter culture is. It's maybe I'll be ever in your favor. And I think you should feel vaguely guilty about it when you have your sourdough starter, frankly, you went like full, full hog. What do they call that? You went ham on it and you use like hand churned, hand grained, like amaranth and old Egyptian grains to do this loaf, right? Yeah, well, the the Egyptians used a very early wheat, the first cultivated wheat,

we think, called emmer, which is also ferro or bread. And they used barley and iron corn also, but usually just for beer. And those are also both very primitive grains. Like barley is used for like soup now. Ferro is like put into warm salads. Seamus makes a point that emmer or ferro and barley, these were like the burliest of grains. They built the people that built empires. But you may now recognize it from the menu of a boho chic outdoor wedding reception.

The Roman armies that conquered Europe were fed emmer and now it's used for warm salads, so that's kind of cool. I'm sure that, you know, a huge like muscle bound cinchurian would find that amazingly amusing. Yeah. So, you know, we got that stuff, but not only for accuracy, but also, you know, this these microbes have been asleep a very long time. You know, if we actually did get ancient microbes, then they lived and went to sleep before modern wheat had ever been bred.

They have no knowledge of it. They want to eat emmer. And what we found just anecdotally is that, you know, this culture that we have, the one that I use actively, because, you know, we have hundreds of samples, but I just use one actively because I sort of stole it around the edge to try out. It doesn't like modern wheat. I took one sample home. I sent the rest to Rich.

And this one sample, I started to kind of raise like a regular sourdough starter, but in a sterile environment, right? Like sterilize all the food and water that it gets. And I use like UV lights and flames and stuff to make sure that didn't get contaminated with anything. So it's really just that sample. And recently, actually, I sent some of it back to Rich and he confirmed that I haven't contaminated it yet, which is pretty good.

And it lets me have a lot of cool equipment in my kitchen, too, which is great. But when I when I split off some of this stuff and try to feed it like modern wheat or hard red wheat or any of these vitals that we've developed over the past couple of thousand years, it just doesn't grow very well. Yeah. No, thank you. And when I feed it emmer, it's like crazy. It just it loves it. It's what, you know, it's it's it's it's food.

It's it's comfort food. And that's a good sign that part of what gives me confidence that we've that we've actually captured some ancient organisms. Sheamus says that sourdough is three ingredients, flour, water and salt. And then, of course, all the little yeasties in the air. Now, the rest, he says, is just technique. OK, think of it this way. So you can have three balls sitting on a counter.

They don't do much. But if you learn to juggle, dang, those three things just became a party. So it's not the objects. It's just what should do with them. There have been teams who have made ancient bread, quote, unquote, an ancient beer, quote, unquote, and they say, oh, it's not very good. And ancient people must have had different tastes on it. Oh, you know, fuck you, bullshit, you know, bullshit.

No, it's just that you're bad at it. It's that you're a scientist and you may be a very talented scientist, but you're not a baker. And if you had a master baker in and that master baker took the time to learn how to do this, that person could probably make really excellent bread using these ingredients and these techniques, just like the people millennia ago did, just like in the Navy, where the food is the most important part of the morale of the sailor, you know, the food is the most important

part of the morale of these work crews. And all these guns were put up in these temporary towns that were at the base of the pyramids or the base of the temples they were building. And we find the bakeries there and the breweries there and the kitchens and the flop houses where they all slept. And, you know, they were fed well. I mean, a guy who works out all day moving multi-ton blocks of granite and, you know, and moving them into position within like the width

of a piece of paper next to one another, which is how the stones are set in the pyramid. Right. Those guys had high caloric intake. They needed to be fed really well. And so I think the job of figuring this out is figuring out how do you make bread that would have satisfied those guys, you know, a guy who could like trivially snap your neck after moving around four ton blocks of granite all day. When someone has been hauling tons of huge bricks for lunch, you do not hand them another brick.

You don't do that. And so you baked it. It came out of the oven. How was it? It was really good. I mean, it was and, you know, but again, like I knew it was going to be really good because I could tell that it was going well. I could tell that the starter was was doing well, you know,

because I had done it all before. It wasn't like a big mysterious reveal, like sort of everybody wants to tell a story. I'm sorry. Yeah. It was a little sweeter. You said on Twitter was a little sweeter. Yeah. Well, you know, all sourdough starters taste different if you if you collect them different places, you know, people say, oh, it's the water and all these things. No, it's just it's just like it's just the microbe content, right?

And the the different species of microbes produce a different flavor. And the the flour that you use produces a different flavor. It's not it's not, you know, mysterious craziness. And, you know, I get this culture when I was amplifying it, when I was feeding it, the sterilized emerald flower, it smelled really different from my other starters. Really, really different. It's probably what excited me about it. And when we tried the bread, the bread was had a had a different delicate sweet character.

Yeah, it was sweeter. And, you know, it was it was sour in a more delicate way. And, you know, the the the main thing was just that. And I mean, the miraculous thing was that it made bread. I mean, it made a really nice loaf of bread. And it was this starter made by sampling a pot. And you should understand that we did it in sterile conditions with sterile fluids. And then it was, you know, always moved under UV light in sterile conditions and fed sterilized.

So there's nothing in it that didn't come from the inside of that pot at all. And it made bread. Yeah. You know, that's that's amazing to me. And watching it and doing it yourself and taking the care and ensuring that it's all sterile and then seeing that happen is extraordinary. So, yeah, I mean, the flavor was different and that was really cool. And I was glad for it because it made me feel like maybe we had done something right.

The overarching thing for me is a little bit more subtle than maybe after listening to me talk about all this, this is going to make sense. But for me, the emotional thing wasn't eating the bread. For me, the emotional thing was that, you know, 4500 years ago, there was someone who was making this bread and she had her starter and it was her whole life. And she was making all these those of bread for all these workmen on the Giza plateau. And it was her job and her life and it was her work. And I got a little bit of her starter and I got to be there with her baking and I was with her.

And that, for me, was the most important and most mind-blowing thing. That you have a connection with this person. Yeah, a real connection, not bullshit. Too, you'll never, you'll never meet. Seamus made the point that the Egyptian culture and religion was based on the idea of eternal life and coming back from periods of dormancy, of forced inactivity. So if you're listening to this in your Tuesdays wet pants, that might strike a chord. The symbolism, the idea of resurrecting that and sharing that activity and this basic most

important activity of making food like that is really special. And I think at the end of the day, that might be why people are so interested in this. Because otherwise, it's inexplicable. I mean, you know, watching yeast cultures grow is not possibly the most thrilling thing. Well, I mean, seeing something fart is fun. Sure. Okay, now I hadn't thought about that. That's true. Starters too, like sourdough starters are really personal to people.

Like they carry them around in jars, they're named. And you know, I think right now with this pandemic, we're seeing a ton of people start to bake and a ton of people start to make their own sourdough, which I'm sure you've noticed. Number one, did you name the sourdough starter? And what makes something a sourdough starter versus another starter? Very stupid question, but you're smart, so I'm asking it. No, it's okay. So again, you just have to keep in mind our place in history that being able to buy purified yeast

for baking that's designed, literally genetically designed for baking is a really new thing. It's really only the past 100 years or so. Prior to that, all bread was made with natural yeast, which we would call sourdough. So you really don't think about it like, you know, a sourdough starter is really just a sample of microbial culture. And that culture can eat flour and make gas and love in your bread. That's it. So sourdough really is a modern concept. And a lot of the reason we call it sourdough is because there's a specific style of baking with those organisms where you have a much longer fermentation at a cooler temperature that brings

out more of the lactic acid, which is what the bacteria poop out and causes the bread to be more sour. And that is done both because people prefer that flavor, but also because it makes the bread last longer, because that lactic acid is a preservative. So if you're going to be, you know, selling food to miners, as they did in San Francisco, then having more lactic acid helps the bread to last longer, not go moldy. And that lactic acid tang comes from a lactobacillus bacteria, full name. You ready for this? Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. Yeah, that's a lot of s's. Because of San Francisco's sourdough history. Now I was born there and I grew up in the Bay Area. I never realized literally until this episode just how hyper local sourdough culture, if you will,

was clam chowder served in a bread bowl. It's a way of life. And if you don't eat the bread bowl, you're actually not allowed back into the city, which is harsh, but it's fair. Also, what about gluten? Okay, 1% of folks have celiac disease, which is an autoimmune disorder that damages a little fingery absorption villi in the intestines. And gluten can trigger all sorts of terrible symptoms. But many more of us may have non celiac gluten sensitivities or can't break down totally different parts of wheat like fruit dance. So sourdough starter and long fermentation can help break down some of that gluten, yes, but also the hard to digest fructans and polysaccharides, which may be why folks have an easier time eating European made breads, because they

straight up might have way better yeast starters that break that stuff down. Research is ongoing. But yes, there is gluten in sourdough less than other types of unfermented dose. But if you find that sourdough doesn't bug your butt like other breads, gluten may or may not even be the real issue. It could be other stuff in wheat that just needed to be properly broken down before you ate it. The fact of the matter is that there's a lot of gluten in bread because it's what makes the balloons that the gas fills that causes it to rise. So, you know, saying there's less or more gluten is kind of funny. As a baker, you want more gluten because that's how your bread rises. And if you don't have gluten, then you have to have something else that can make little

balloons inside the dough to hold the gas, which is ultimately what makes it bread. Bread is like it's like it's like it's really like froth farming, right? You make a foam, right? You rise it and it's a foam and then you freeze that foam in the oven and then you eat it really kind of is what the deal is with that. And so, you ask also if I named the the culture and no, I didn't name the Egyptian culture because it doesn't belong to me. It belongs to that baker and that's a really important thing to keep in mind. You know, we looted so much stuff out of Egypt in the West and also worldwide. These things belong to the ancient Egyptians. They made them, they belong to them and this this this culture is no different. It belongs to that baker. So,

my intention is once we've done our work to return that to Egypt and to make a strong point about the ownership of that. So, that's why I didn't name it. Seamus thinks people have probably named their starters for centuries and there's one page on Reddit of just folks sharing their starter names such as, I plucked a few for you, Bradley Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Yeast McEastface, Vincent Vando, and Doi Sechanal. The name of the subreddit, breaddit, nice. Now, this tradition in the past may have come from a family necessity rather than a hobby, but you know, in a time of sheltering, of getting out of the store less, being able to make your own fresh food at home feels kind of more important these days.

It's like the difference between somebody naming their yacht and somebody naming their fishing boat. You know, one is a lot more serious. Do you think it's, do you think that people making their own bread is somehow like an attempt to feel more grounded to those times? I think it's the most human thing you can do. I think that the story of bread and the story of the human race are inextricably linked and I should point out here that that's kind of biased. In Asia, it's really the story of rice and rice cultivation, but it's that same deep connection. Maybe in a really deep way, in a genetic sense, the idea of bread and the comfort of bread and the baking of bread being the most comforting thing, the most grounding,

homey thing we can do. You know, we evolved with that. It's in us that I think it may be that we have it backwards. It may be that it's inescapable in a crisis that people will start to bake. Mm-hmm. And if you inspire other people to bake, then it's your fault if they're walking around named jars. Yeah, no, that's been pointed out to me. I've had people on social media who I thought were joking but are actually angry with me that there's no flour. Like, I literally was like, oh, yeah, ha, ha, ha. And they're like, no, fuck you. It's like, whoa, okay. Dude, I just don't think I'm actually responsible, but okay. Well, I do have a ton of questions from listeners. Can I just super lightning round like throw a couple at you? Yeah, for sure. I'm sorry,

I talked so long. Go. I love it. Are you kidding? This is my favorite. After the break, how to bake bread and all of your questions. But first, every episode, we donate to a cause of theologist choosing, you know that. And with no hesitation, Seamus asked that his go to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. The Boys and Girls Clubs provide a safe haven for more than 4 million youth, giving them an opportunity to discover their great futures. They have tutoring and mentorship and after-school programs, and a donation went to them in Seamus' name. That donation was made possible by some sponsors of the show who you may hear about now. Okay, how to culture a starter and bake some bread and your questions. The first

question was from patron and a mutual beloved friend, Casey Handmer. Seamus worked with his kick-ass brilliant wife, Dr. Christine Corbett, and Casey is also a genius and an accomplished baker. And I had no idea these two were buds, but Seamus and I off air spent a while just chatting about how wonderful and curious and smart they are. Anyway, Casey Handmer, can yeast synthesize vitamins? What's up with that? I think yeast can actually be made to synthesize almost anything. I've looked at some papers recently, Casey, and I will text them to you, where people actually have yeast making all sorts of molecules and there's actually a naturally occurring yeast that makes oil. It can actually make olefins and even wax. So it's an incredibly

versatile life form. Okay, side note. I did some digging of my own and for some light bed time reading, may I suggest the Journal of Microbial Cell Factories March 2019 paper titled, Increasing Jojoba-like Wax Esther Production in Saccharomyces Cerevisii by Enhancing Very Long Chain Monosaturated Fatty Acid Synthesis. It's a Ripper. Helen Pang wants to know, how does yeast activity correlate to temperature? Like how fast does sourdough rise at 40 degrees versus 60 degrees versus 80 degrees? That's a complicated question. And I will unnecessarily complicate it further. So yeast, like all microbes, operates at a higher rate at a higher temperature. Right up until you start to like, you know, shake it apart with heat and it dies. Proofing your bread at a higher temperature

is going to make it prove faster. It's going to change the way that the water moves around in your dough and it's going to change some other things about it too. So you got to be careful not to go really hot all the time. But the flavor profile of the bread also gets changed specifically with sourdough because you have a mix of microorganisms and all of those microorganisms are more or less happy at different temperatures. Like bacteria are much happier at lower temperatures. And I mentioned before when we were talking about San Francisco sourdough that you can make bread more sour by fermenting at a lower temperature for a longer period of time. And that's because the bacteria are happier there. On the other side, in Egypt on the Giza Plateau, it's

pretty hot during the day. And so one of the things I learned about these yeast samples that we have from there is that they're really happy working at 95 or 98 degrees. Oh, I like it hot. And in fact, you can get a fairly sour bread at 90 degrees, which I don't find to be the case with other sourdough starters that I have. And again, a sourdough starter is just water, flour, and whatever little single celled friends and lactobacillus bacteria harmoniously chomp and break it down. Baker's yeasts or quick yeast that you buy in a package work faster, but they may have fewer nutritional and digestive benefits than fermenting your dough and raising a beautiful, burping sourdough baby that you name like bready white or scoop doggie doggie.

You gotta understand that you're the gift that keeps on giving. Also, Elliot Warren, great question, said, I heard of someone making bread using their vaginal yeast, and I thought, that was so cool. Maybe not recommended, but super cool, Elliot says. And yes, Elliot, I looked it up for all of us. That is one way to get yeast. And Zoe Stavry, a British blogger, wrote all about it. I followed some links of hers, and it led me to getting milk rolled, but I'm never one to give up. I'm never going to let you down. So I kept searching, and her blog post, I finally found it. It said, the end product of this experiment was pretty tasty, but the yeast was likely just the stuff that was in the air and in the flour.

There are better, maybe less personally invasive ways to procure fresh wild yeast. And patrons, including Heather Munro, Tover Hennis and his lovely wife, Marie Stridham, Veronica, Brandon Lapine, and Carly Caramba wanted to know about proper yeast hunting in the wild. Danielle Garrett wants to know, first time question asked, how does one know what kind of wild yeast is good for what? Like, is the yeast found in certain areas of the wild? And Sam Gordon wants to know, do yeast from different locations contribute to the bed break, the bread bake time or rise? Like, if you were going to, let's say, go out, you get a wild hair to get a wild yeast. What is a good strategy? Well, a few things. So, yeah, different yeast you collect in different places, absolutely taste

different, and they act different. A lot of questions between social media right now, including from close friends of mine are, you know, oh my God, how long is this going to take? And how long should it rise? How long, you know, is my starter going to take to, you know, get over the rubber band that I put around my jar? And the answer is, look, based on how much water versus flour you have, what microbes you have, what temperature it is, everything changes. And that's part of the great thing about baking with sourdough is that it's not like a rules-based thing. It's the ultimate escape from, you know, programming or actuarial work. You don't know, it's 100% feel and you just have to watch and smell and listen and learn and practice a lot.

And there are a lot, you know, there are a lot of Instagramers who have like, you know, this is my sourdough starter. And I got to be honest with you, everyone I know who's a baker knows that they're full of shit. Like they're putting commercial yeast in there and showing it pop up. It's totally clear. Gotcha. Also, there are a lot of bakers out there on Instagram and on Twitter who say, oh, here's my 100% whole wheat. And you're like, that is not 100% whole wheat. Like it has none of the signs of being whole wheat and you're full of shit. But we try to be nice. But no, you get a different flavor everywhere. And look, there's yeast in the flour that you get because the yeast is living on the grain and the wild on the farm. So you can actually make a good

starter in your kitchen. You don't have to, you know, sterilize your flour and then go out in nature and collect it. I do that because I want to get different flavors and characteristics from the yeast that we get in different places. But you don't have to if you just want to experiment with a starter. And you don't have to use whole grain. You can use regular white bread flour and you're going to have a much easier time. I'd encourage you to do that. But, you know, if you are a freak like me and you go out in the field, you'll get all sorts of different organisms from different places and they'll give you really different flavors in your breads. And it's like super fun and interesting. And it's also, you know, it's community with our ancestors who had no choice.

Right. You can really respect them by trying to see if you can bake like they did. Trying to see if you could feed your family with some grass seed and some water and some salt if you're lucky. And that's really, you know, that's a cool thing. And again, you know, in this crisis that we have now, I think that, you know, we all are drawn, are drawn back toward that. And I think it is important to remember that people endured much bigger challenges than the one we have right now with much less and did great. So if you're sad about staying in or annoyed that you're missing Coachella, I get it. But remember, we are saving a lot of pain, including our own, by just sheltering in place. You used to have to know CPR or how to work a fire hose in order to save lives. But

isn't it cool? You can do the same thing just by watching Netflix and eating frozen pizza or baking bread. But how do you do it? So many of you patrons wanted to know, what are the tips for baking? Where do we start? Sheila Littlepage, Michael Aguirre, Ira Gray, Guillermo Riano, Annie Colonico, Kim, Kelly Salmon, Catherine Gilbert, Katie Coast, Kaley Roan, first time question askers, Rachel Davis and Heather Moore. All wanted to know, how do we start? Kelly said, any tips on homemade bread one could make at home with access to flour, no yeast, and a housemate who will absolutely throw away anything bubbling in a jar no matter how much promise it holds. Catherine Gilbert wanted to know, why the f can't I cook bread?

Fails every time. We understand. That's why we're here. If you were going to start, if you're like, this is it, I want to work with my hands. I want to get my mind off of things. I want to bake bread. Where should people start? Well, there are a lot of resources that, if you look on my Twitter page, just shameless blackly on Twitter, one word, I am continuously putting up there a big thread that has a thread on yeast collection with some like, you know, jokes of various levels of funny in it, but it has pictures and shows you exactly what it should look like. And it takes about a week. And then there's a tutorial and then taking that and making your first loaf of bread with it. And a lot of people have had success

doing it. And like I said, there are many resources for this. You can look all over the place and the lot of really great, you know, video, pictorial examples of how to do this, you should look for it. It's really not that hard once you get your mind around it. It's like training a dog. And dog trainers always tell you that you're not training the dog, you're training yourself, right? And it's the same thing. It's training yourself to pay attention to what you're doing and not thinking that it's like an app and you tell it bread now bread and it does it. That's not how it works. Yeah. Okay, you need to get out of yourself, get out of your fucking head and get into the dough a little bit. And the rewards you're going to get is manyfold. Okay, I searched

his Twitter and I found this massive thread from June 2, 2019. And I'm going to read it to you very quickly in an overview. I'm also going to link this in the show notes. Okay, so Seamus wrote, first, you need to have a very active technical term bang in yeast culture ready, we will need 150 grams of culture for this loaf. So put 80 to 90 grams of flour in a bowl, pour 20 grams of your main culture in and mix with enough pure water to get the consistency shown here. Also, side note for me, go for pure water or filtered water or boil your water and let it cool. That way it doesn't have a bunch of chlorine that kills your yeast. Just saying. Okay, Seamus says, now wait. While you wait, he says, take a moment to get your shit together. You're going to need 300 plus grams

of filtered water that you let sit for 30 plus minutes, pure sea or mind salt, really good extra virgin olive oil and the best flour you can find. Other things need to have ready, he says, an oven that can really get to 500 degrees Fahrenheit or 260 centigrade, a good kitchen scale, a whisk, a big main bowl, a medium bowl, a baking sheet, some ice cubes, plastic wrap or waxed cloth and the ability to stay sane. Well, nothing seems to happen, he says. He shows a picture of what your culture will look like when it's just about ready to go. There's a bubbly surface, looks like jello and he says, we're ready to begin. Using your scale and being exact as you can, add 250 grams water, 25 grams of oil and 150 grams culture to your bowl. The culture should float, he says.

Now add 100 grams of the flour. Now whisk everything together until it's smooth. We want a lot of air in the mix for the yeast to respirate. Remember, these little dudes got to breathe. Next, he says, add the remaining 400 grams of flour to make a total of 500. Mix it around. There are pictures of the consistency, he says, if it's too dry, add a little water and knead it, too wet, use some flour. Should be just on the edge of sticky but not actually coming off of anything. Now cover it and wait for half an hour. What's happening, he says, is that water is moving around and filling all the flour, dragging the yeast along with it. He says, next, we either add a dye of boredom or prepare the bowl for the next step. He shows some kneading tips, folding some salt into the dough. He says,

to recap, mix all the stuff together. Wait, like an abandoned dog. Knead in the salt. Wait, like an unwanted lover. Do the foldy thing. Wait, foldy, wait some more, foldy. Nearly perish from ennui. He goes on to detail how to continue to let it rise, a cute pretty slice in it, tossing it in a 500 degree oven for 10 minutes, then putting in some ice cubes, lowering the heat and letting it continue to cook and become bread. Anyway, that is an overview. If you go to alleyward.com slash oligies slash gastroegyptology, I will link this particular Twitter thread. There's so many photos, so many videos, and just follow Seamus Blackley while you're there for all of your bread inspiration needs.

Rachel Davis has a first-time question. I'll ask her, she says, what's the best type of pan to bake bread in? Glass, metal, ceramic? Does it matter with bread? Apparently not. If you don't know, all of a sudden you want to know. Rachel, it's a good question and hey, but people have baked bread in literally everything. Hobos make bread on railroad tracks as Casey knows. The Australians have damper bread, which is made on a hot plate. The Egyptians baked with no ovens in pots that they buried in a hole with embers in them. You can bake probably in anything. If you're starting out as a baker and you're doing your oven, the easiest thing to do is to bake inside a Dutch oven inside your oven, or any kind of like, you

know, stoneware or metal pot. If you're an inexperienced baker, it helps you to get really nice looking blows because it keeps all the moisture around the bread and moisture inside the oven, believe it or not, is it really helps the bread to stay elastic as it bakes and as it expands in the oven. And you've probably seen these videos of like bread baking in the oven. That's so amazing. This is the joy for me. I love bread. If you have a container and a container inside your oven, it really helps with that. So you can look up Dutch oven, Dutch oven bread baking is a really great way to start. If you're like a Dutch oven, are we talking about farting again? No, ma'am, we're not. So a Dutch oven is like a cast iron pot with a lid and the benefit to starting off

baking your bread in a sealed pot is that it traps the steam from the dough and it gives your sourdough a good rise and a shiny crust. So if you have an oven safe pot with a lid, look into baking times with that action. Oh, and speaking of upper crust, Riley Klinging Smith wants to know, why do people make slits at the top of loaves before baking them? Is it decorative or functional? When did it start? How long have people been doing it as art too? I know I've seen some like beautiful spiral slits. What's going on with that? It's like all good engineering. It's both decorative and also functional. Okay. So when you put bread in the oven, as I said before, bread is like a foam. You know, you're really like, you know, you're like froth farming

and all the microbes in the bread, whether it's commercially yeast or wild yeast or anything, have farted out CO2 into the dough and the gluten in the dough or if you're making gluten free, you know, your xanthan gum or whatever you're using to give it elasticity, what you're really doing is making a ton of little balloons inside the dough and they're filling with the gas that the microbes are pooping out or farting out. And this causes the bread to rise. And it's kind of cool because it rises everywhere at the same time at the same rate. This, by the way, is exactly analogous to the way that the universe expanded. But I don't want to digress. Now, okay, when you bake, what you're really doing is you're trying to freeze that

into into position so that you have like a solid object now, because the dough is obviously like all squishy when it's when it's rising. And when you put it in the oven, it comes out as solid. But in the oven, when the when that CO2 heats up, it expands. Okay, everybody in high school should have learned the ideal gas law PV equals NRT. And what it basically says is that all things being equal, if you heat up a gas, it expands. And that's what happens to the little pockets of CO2 of yeast farts inside your dough, they all expand. And so the loaf expands and pops up inside the oven. And what will happen if you don't have places that you've slashed on the surface of the bread for that expansion to take place is that your your loaf is going to rip open. And that's

cool. That's cool and kind of free jazz, you know, and it's like, you know, it's going to be weird. But if you want to control that and have it look, you know, sort of professional and adult and all that, people have developed, you know, really sophisticated ways to introduce faults, basically fault lines on the surface of the bread so that it splits open in a predictable way. And so that's what people are really doing. And if you if you get a lot of practice with it, then you can control how it opens up and make, you know, really beautiful designs. But at, you know, at its most fundamental level, if you don't want the thing ripped open, and also to be honest, if you want the bread to have really good texture, if you want the crumb to be nice, you want to make

sure to relieve that stress so that so that all the bubbles can continue to expand. Because if in part of your loaf, they can't expand like they want, because they're constricted, then you're going to have dense bread there. And you don't want you don't want dense bread. So you want to relieve that stress. So that's basically the deal and learning to do that stretching and learning how to to make your dough so that the outer layer when you're ready to put it in the oven is a little bit drier than the inside so that it takes those slash marks in a way that you can control better is part of the skill of learning how to make really good bread. So those bread slashes, side note are called scoring. And Seamus has some guidelines for how many to do essentially

make your decorative gashes add up to the length of the loaf total to give some expanding room as it cooks. And he makes his about a quarter inch to a half an inch deep and with a razor blade, but likely a knife or a very long toenail will probably do. I don't know your situation. Ezra wants to know, can you need bread dough too much? Or is it better to overneat or underneath? It is that's an interesting question. So I you know, it's hard to imagine overneating bread. Usually when people get really tense about kneading bread, they're really what they're really doing is is is getting something else wrong. What you're doing when you're kneading is you're aligning all of these like crazy long chains of molecules protein molecules and

say the bread so that they form better gas pockets. And so you're making it so that when the microbes, you know, fart out their gas, it stays around in the bread as opposed to just like venting off and then your bread doesn't rise. So you can actually have a ton of of microbes like happily living and farting in a loaf. And if you don't have enough gluten or if you don't have something in there that can make balloons, then all that CO2 is just going to float away. And you're going to have a hockey puck. And so, you know, what you're doing when you're kneading is you're you're trying to set that gluten up and distribute it so that it naturally forms bubbles. Listen up, because this is the analogy that we all need. It's no different than if you remember

when you're learning how to blow bubbles with a gum, there's a like super specific way that you need to learn how to like form it so that it's in the right kind of a sheet and it's the right thickness and then when you blow on it, it makes a bubble. Kneading is essentially exactly like chewing that bubble gum. And there's not you don't have to need in the conventional sense or in a bread machine, you know, a very effective technique, especially with the more, you know, cranky grains that have less gluten. So it's really it's harder to get those bubbles to form is a technique of stretching. Some people call it no knead bread. In fact, you have to need the no knead bread, what you're just doing, you're stretching it. And that mechanical motion of these long molecules

against each other aligns them. And that turns out to be what it takes to make it so that the bubble can form successfully. There's way more than you ever wanted to know about that. No, that's amazing. Like, oh, that's why you do it. Like the science of cooking makes makes it so much easier to adhere to those practices instead of lazily skipping steps. Yeah, that's right. Human beings hate like being told to do something and not why. No, you just do this. Yeah, but why, man? Why? I need a reason. Alex Quintin wants to know why their starter, why their sourdough starter stops growing from day four, like day three, it's beautiful, doubles in size, perfect. And then day four stops growing. And they say, I feel like I keep doing it wrong. So I dump it in

the bin. Oh, don't dump it in the bin. No. So it's a sourdough starter is like having billions of pets. And some days they, you know, poo in the living room. And that's just how it is. And don't, don't, you don't, you don't throw away your dog because, you know, he does that and don't throw away your starter. You know, it goes up and down. And I think that, you know, part of part of the issue here is the, you know, Instagram poisoning of people who show these like, you know, banging starters in these jars. And again, like, you know, anybody who does wild starters and feeds them, you know, grains knows that 90% of those pictures are garbage and lies. So don't beat yourself up, you know, just keep feeding it. And a few important things about, about starter cultures.

First of all, as, as the, the microbes eat the food, and they, they excrete excrete whatever they're going to excrete, they poo. It's CO2, lactic acid, alcohol, you know, whatever it is, it's a big mix of things based on whatever is in your sample. Just like you wouldn't want to, you know, sleep in your bed if you pooed in your bed, they don't want to do that's not good for them. And so when you pour half off, really pour half off, like be, you have to be really brutal. And you have to replace it with fresh flour and fresh water because the pH changes, you know, the CO2 changes the pH and makes it more acidic in there. And that's bad for them. It'll cause them to grow more slowly. So you have to be really careful and replace that quite a bit. And, you

know, if it's, you know, slowing down, you can feed it two or three times a day. It's no big deal. And sometimes you won't even see a difference, but you have to understand the microbes are in there. And unless you've killed them with heat or your roommate is a total dick and has like poured bleach in there or something, it's not dead. And believe me, you know, if we can amplify, you know, a few yeast molecules from a 5,000 year old pot into bread, you know, you can't, there's no way that you've killed all but like two molecules or yeast cells in your starter. So don't, don't give up on your starter. Come on, man. Have some sympathy. Don't, don't be a monster. Oh, come on, man. And you know, you mentioned the old bread and Abelot, Abelot asked,

what did the ancients put on their bread? Like, did butter exist? What kind of oils did they smear it with tahini, yogurt? Like, how was it eaten? And did you adhere to that when you first made your ancient loaf? Oh, right. So, well, a few things. First of all, fats. So I have, I'm the proud owner of a, of a vast library of different ancient animal fats. I've tried baking and seasoning pots and using them for all sorts of different things from beef tallow to goose fat to lamb fat, flax oil, all sorts of different plant oils. And they all make good bread. In fact, I have to be honest with you, the pork fat bread is ridiculously awesome. Really? Oh, yeah. And, and this was all because, you know, we were trying to figure out what fats the might have been around

in the old kingdom, because, you know, there wasn't like a recipe, people would have used the fats at hand. And there were a lot of waterfowl used for food in the, in the old kingdom. And also, surprisingly, a lot of beef. And so, you know, we tried all those things out and they all worked, and they're, they're quite good. The ancient Egyptians also put various spices into their bread. The bread that I make, I put roasted coriander in, because we find that in all the mass spectroscopy studies of old kingdom, and Giza bread, is very common thing for them to add. And when that bread comes out of the oven, and remember that in these cultures, people ate bread as a main food stuff. It wasn't like what they had for breakfast, and they weren't making

like avocado toast with it. It was their main food stuff. These were peasants. So they'd eat it right away. So the loaf didn't last. There wasn't like day old bread, right? And when you get this loaf out of the hole in the ground, and you take the thing off, and you let it cool for a bit, it does not need any topping. It just, it doesn't need it. And so it's a satisfying meal in itself. Now, that said, the ancient Egyptians are notorious for eating onions. In fact, the three things we always see in funerary offerings are bread, beer, and onions, which always causes me to think that like, I don't want to be in a small room with an ancient Egyptian. But, but I'm guessing that you would have had this bread with coriander in it and some onions fried in duck fat.

Oh, my God. And that's, that's, and I've done that. And that's really exceptionally good food. Oh, Seamus has also stepped up his gastro-egyptology game by experimenting, cooking the ancient starter dough in these conical vessels in a pit of hot coals to more authentically replicate ancient loaves. And I feel like this is not the work of an amateur. This is a professional gastro-egyptologist, but coming up, he puts it all in perspective. So his precision comes from play and from passion. So this should be fun after all, you should like this. What about the last couple of questions I always ask? Any flimflam that you want to debunk, any myths about bread startering, bread, bread starters, sourdough starters that you wish people knew?

Wow. So many, but the, well, the main thing is just that, you know, this is a very ancient thing. And people who knew nothing about biology or the internet could do this better than we ever will. So the key thing about sourdough is to just let the fuck go. Stop overthinking it and just work on it. You know, this is a, it's a skill, not a recipe. That's a good, you need bumper stickers. You need to sell merch. I know people want to buy your starter too, your ancient starter. And it's like, uh-uh. Well, yeah. There are two reasons for that. The first one is that we're in the middle of the research. And the second one is, like I said, it doesn't belong to me. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's beautiful. What is something that annoys you the most about the process of bread making?

What's, what's the most irksome? What's the crappiest or the most tedious or vexing element of baking bread or breaking or baking old bread? You mean aside from just being me? All right. Well, so that there are two obvious stands out, the standouts. The first one is that, you know, I mill all my own flour. So I have like these bags of grain that show up in my house. And milling flour is hard. It's hard work. And it's loud and it makes a mess. It has to do it a lot. Second thing is that I'm incredibly careful to maintain the sterility, the non-contamination of these samples. And so, you know, feeding my starter takes me half an hour. And I do it every day. And that's just a lot of time and effort. That is a pain in the ass. And it's part of the reason I apologize to

everybody who's that I'm so cranky and people say, well, how do you know? I heard that sourdough starters get contaminated by the flour that you feed them and that they change based on and I'm like, oh, I just have no patience after spending half an hour with a fucking autoclave and UV lights, the sterile gloves every day, like, oh, you shut the fuck up. Read the thread. Maybe you're just angry. I need some onions in goose fat. And what about your favorite thing? Your favorite thing about baking, your favorite thing about bread, the thing that gives you the butterflies the most? There's a moment where I was, after I had finished milling flour one day,

and I have these big sort of outsized mason jars that I put the milled flour in, and I label them with a date. And after I sterilize flour, I label it sterilized with the date on it because I've got good lab technique because I'm a particle physicist. And I was trained when there were machines that could trivially kill you if you weren't careful. And I found myself, I'm going to actually get for clumped at this by one day, I don't know, like six weeks ago, I finished milling and I was writing emmer on the jar. And I looked over and I realized that I had written it in hieroglyphs. And I didn't even know. Oh, my God. And I felt like I felt like I was there. I felt like I was felt like I was a worthy

human being. I was, I was communing with my elders, my ancestors. It was really special. Wow. Oh, shoot. I was tearing up too. I'm going to use all my tears to make a sourdough starter now. There you go. That's right. Raised on the tears of podcast hosts. No, it's really, that's really special. That's really amazing. I want to look up how that's actually written in hieroglyphs. That's really, really interesting. The word is bet it. I looked up the hieroglyph for emmer wheat and it looks like a foot, a hand, a loaf, and a little shaft of wheat. And it's just amazing to think of how many people over how many years

have seen and read that. You got all this garbage about the pyramids being built by aliens and mysterious technologies and all of this. And you know, there's a quarry where stone was taken for the pyramids. And in one corner of it, you can go and I don't know if you can see this or not, but I've seen pictures of it. There's a little drawing that one of the stone masons made of his friend. And it's this picture of a guy holding a chisel with a hammer. And he's got kind of a big nose and over it is written big nose. And isn't it so much more impressive that those incredible structures were built by big nose and his friends than it is by aliens? Isn't that enough?

Isn't it enough that they were able to do that? Why do we need aliens? I think what you're doing of getting people interested in the history and the culture of it and the people and slowing down and trying to do it themselves, I think that's really cool. I mean, in a time like this that sucks, I mean, it's great that you're doing this. There's a lot of people that will have so much more appreciation. So who knew that a particle physicist and a guy who designed the Xbox would be the one in a crisis to help us slow down and relax and stay inside and get back to basics? The simulation, man. It throws us some curveballs, doesn't it? Do you want to know like a weird, a truly weird, like conspiracy theory kind of thing

that's right in front of our faces, but that's so fucking weird at the same time that it's too weird to even think about? No, what is it? If you go look at the Xbox logo, okay, it's a loaf of bread. No. I'm telling you, go look at it. It's a fucking sourdough loaf. Who designed that? Was that you? So the original logo for the for our, for the first one was different from that. This is what they came up with after I left. It's a bull. It's a fucking bull. It's crazy. Isn't that insane? So that's a little creepy. That's a little mysterious and you know, that's a little like bear and stain bears. Mandela effect. Just a little bit. Yeah, that's a little bit ex files right there. So ask smart people stupid questions.

Ask sweet people sourdough questions because they have knowledge to spare and bread is tasty. We're all in this together to stay in and slow down and maybe reframe and tell the people we love that we love them, that we loaf them. You can follow Sheamus Blackley on Twitter. There's a link in the show notes and also follow Egyptologists Dr. Serena Love and Richard Bowman, the microbiologist. They're also linked. Kieran Danacci came up with a word, gastroegyptology. Thank you for that. We are at Allergies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Allie Ward with 1L on both and a ton of links including to Sheamus's threads are up at alleyward.com slash allergies slash gastroegyptology

and bleeped episodes and transcripts are up at alleyward.com slash allergies dash extras. Link in the show notes. Thank you to professional transcriptionist Emily White in her army of volunteers in the Allergies transcribers Facebook group. I see you. I love you all. Thank you for what you do. Allergies merch is available at allergiesmerch.com. Thank you, Shannon Feltes and Bonnie Dutch, sisters who host the comedy podcast You Are That for managing that. Thank you, Erin Talbert for wrangling the Allergies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to each and every patron for submitting questions and being just the anchor of the show. Thank you to Travis and Miles. Congrats on your new sourdough starter. I want to hear what it's named.

Happy birthday to my niece Olivia and my good pal Colleen Flanigan. Assistant editing was done by the wonderful Jarrett Sleeper, who does quarantine calisthenics every day at noon Pacific time, sometimes in character in a red long john onesie and a floppy hat, calling himself an old timey gold prospector by the name of Antoine Calvin de Beauvier, who's avenging his nemesis Silver Tongue Jack for stealing his biscuits and bacon. Workouts in those themes. Those are up on his Instagram, Jarrett dash Sleeper. Get into it. And of course, thank you to lead editor and host of the kitty themed per cast and the dino themed sea Jurassic, right? Steven Rye Morris. We couldn't dough it without you. I'm sorry.

Theme song was written by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands. And if you listen to the end, you know, I tell you a secret. And this week, I was very excited to interview Seamus and a total boyfriend, Jarrett. I was like, I'm talking to this sourdough expert. He also invented the Nintendo PS4. He thought I was joking and I wasn't. And he paused and Jarrett got on his discord chat with his gamer dude friends and told them what I had said. And then I heard them all laugh on speakerphone and they continued to roast me just ruthlessly. And I deserve it. So apparently Xbox is not a Nintendo or a PS4. I was just throwing around words. I don't know the difference. Now I do. But yes, look it up. The Xbox logo very much looks like a sourdough.

Goosebumps. All right, I bought a go. Stay safe. You're doing great out there. Okay. Bye bye. Seriology, cryptozoology, litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, spectrology, pathology, seriology, cellulogy.