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Cheese (mander.xyz)

submitted 4 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] criticon@lemmy.ca 14 points 4 months ago

At least you can make bread from old yeast

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bread-was-made-using-4500-year-old-egyptian-yeast-180972842/

[-] roguetrick@lemmy.world 14 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

He cultivated the yeast for a week using unfiltered olive oil, hand-milled barley and einkorn, one of the earliest forms of wheat, until he had a starter, like that used to make sourdough bread.

This is so dumb. It's highly likely the yeast he actually cultivated was the active yeast living already on the barley, the olive oil or in the air. This is literally all you need to do to make sourdough starter, no innoculation necessary.

[-] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 8 points 4 months ago

Yeah, might work if the starter he used was fully isolated, but I kinda doubt that was done.

But it always kinda trips me out how even experienced bakers think sourdough has to have some kind of magic seed to work as sourdough. It doesn't matter what you start with, the flour you feed with, and the environment you're in are going to have yeast already present, so you'll eventually end up with whatever is in those being what's doing the work, not what was in the inoculation.

Same with the lactobacilli, whatever strain is present locally is going to end up as the working strain.