Ancient Baking this Weekend. Let’s start by comparing modern and old grains. On the right, modern engineered hard red spring wheat. On the left, heirloom Emmer, which in Old Kingdom ancient Egypt was the main bread grain- “bedjet.”
It’s even easier to see the difference in the bags. Humans have done a thousand-odd years of genetic engineering to wheat cultivars. My Old Kingdom baking buddies mastered what was basically a wild grass. I’d estimate they were 100-300% smarter than me.
I don’t want to get you all excited for baking today- this takes a while. Today, I have removed a sample of our research yeast from the fridge and am feeding it sterilized bedjet flour now, so we have an active culture for baking tomorrow.
Ancient Egyptian Bakery Update (short). Thrills! Chills! Holes filled with Embers!
I now have TWO holes filled with embers, for parallel experiments. These are terra-cotta tagines, which are doubling as BDJ3 while we wait out the quarantine. They are filled with dough, made from Emmer, coriander, and the (hopefully) Ancient Egyptian bread culture...
If you’re wondering what this is about, google “Egyptian Yeast” or read this:
Today I achieved* something that I’ve been trying to do for a year. The slice of bread here was made with leavening cultures sampled from ancient Egyptian baking vessels, using ancient Emmer wheat, with an ancient Egyptian recipe, using ancient Egyptian baking tools, and NO OVEN.
The * is because at the end, I did a dumb thing and burned the top of the bread. But read on...
If this all sounds like completely insane lies, well, probably, but check out the delusional thread below. With the help of some friends, I collected some baking cultures from the time of the construction of the pyramids!
“Levain” is a fancy French baking term (pronounced the same as your friend Herb Levin’s last name) that’s basically a fermentation kickstart for sourdough making. Someone asked so now you’re going to suffer through some goddamn manslplaining.
Like a lot of things in our weird new “sourdough is a trend” world, hipsters (and people who want to seem like hipters) make a big fancy fuss about levains, and all sorts of shit you should put in them and do. So, in an effort to bring some regular-guy to all this, let me dispel.
It’s a HIGHLY technical process in which you make a small amount of very wet dough: some flour, a bit of your starter culture, and some water. Your bread recipe will guide you how much you’ll need; I usually make 150% of what’s needed, and give the rest to a friend- a new starter
QUARANTINE BAKE-IN BEGINS! Here are two of the starters I will use tomorrow, both collected in the wild in England last year. One has been trained on Rye, the other on Emmer (Farro). In a minute I’ll show how I use sterile procedures to feed the ANCIENT EGYPTIAN cultures!
The recipe I will be riffing on tomorrow will be this, from a tutorial I put up last year:
These two starters are made from the cultures I collected last summer in the thread below! As you can see it doesn’t take any fancy recipes or modern things- just patience and a certain kind of mental disorder.