ANNABEL LANGBEIN
Cook like an Ancient Egyptian
Yeast magic
In July this year, the charred remains of morethan-14,000-year-old bread were found at an archaeological dig site in the Black Desert in north-east Jordan. The bread was shown to have been made from wild cereals, such as barley, einkorn or oats, as well as tubers from an aquatic relative of papyrus, which had been ground into flour. The amazing part of this story is that the hunter-gathering people who were living here were making bread some 4000 years before the cultivation of plants as crops. The question now being asked is whether bread, an intregral part of our diet, which provides an important source of carbohydrates and nutrients, may in fact have provided an incentive for people to take up plant cultivation and farming.
Yeast, or rather the knowledge that yeast could be used to leaven bread and ferment beer and wine, was mastered by the early Egyptians. Hieroglyphics suggest that ancient Egyptians were using yeast and the process of fermentation to produce alcoholic beverages and to leaven bread before the development of a written language more than 5000 years ago. In those times, the biochemical process of fermentation was not understood and undoubtedly looked upon as some kind of voodoo magic.
There really is a sense of magic when you add yeast to flour and water and watch it start to bubble and rise. Yeast is an extraordinary thing. In her beautiful book, Ferment, author Holly Davis relates that, “When an archaeological dig in Egypt unearthed a bakery, the walls were scraped and those scrapings added to fresh flour and water, and wooshka! The mixture expressed life, 3000 years or more after the last baking. Immortality is the domain of bacteria and yeasts.”
In early times, the wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria that are found associated with cultivated grains and fruits were the start point for leaven, a soft dough-like mixture that was (and still is in many places) the beginning point for bread. A small portion of this dough was used to start or leaven each new bread dough. Natural selection of high-performing yeasts was achieved by saving a “good“batch of dough for inoculating the next batch. Through these selections, we now have the commercial yeasts available today.
This week I share my favourite bread dough, which uses cooked potato and olive oil, to produce a wonderful flatbread that’s puffy, chewy and crusty and can be cooked in so many ways.