Why Scientists Used a 5,000-Year-Old Mummy to Bake Freaky Sourdough Bread
· Vice
I recently wrote about Ötzi the Iceman, a guy who died 5,300 years ago and was so well preserved in a glacier in northern Italy that scientists can still study the microbes hanging out on and inside him, according to a new study published in the journal Microbiome.
A small detail that didn’t get revealed until after I submitted my article is all about a little extracurricular research the team conducted with some of those yeast microbes. Nothing crazy. It’s exactly what any rational, sane, well-adjusted person would do with yeast microbes found on a 5,000-year-old mummy: they turned that ancient dead-guy mummy yeast into sourdough starter, and then baked a loaf of bread with it.
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Ötzi, found in 1991, has been housed in a refrigerated chamber at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology. In 2019, the researchers gathered all sorts of samples and found four strains of yeast. Researchers revived the yeast in lab conditions and could think of no better way to test its viability than by making a loaf of sourdough like they were still living in the pandemic.
Mummy Bread Is Delicious…?
The first attempts at sourdough failed. Three months of trial and error later, they produced what they described as a “very, very good” loaf.
There are some practical lessons to be taken from this, like how cold-activated yeasts could allow fermentation at lower temperatures, saving energy in food production. There’s also the lesson that these researchers are some damn freaks who are eating mummy-flavored bread.
While there is some debate among researchers as to whether the yeast they used to make the sourdough starter was ancient, because it could’ve been a more recent introduction into Ötzi’s body, the simple fact remains that these people scooped off some gunk from a guy who’d been dead for over 5000 years and made lunch with it. That’s a stigma that’s going to be hard to shake off. They’ve turned themselves into the scientific version of the weird kid on the playground who ate a worm on a dare…but nobody dared them.
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