Ancient bread rises in gourmet status

Separating the wheat from the chaff was no easy task for the ancient Egyptians, who used a tough-hulled type of wheat called emmer to make bread and beer. Modern interpretations of ancient documents portray their bread as coarse and gritty. A new study, however, suggests that the ancient Egyptians were better bakers and brewers than these documents had let on.

 An analysis of some very stale bread loaves--up to 4,000 years old--and beer residues clinging to shards of pottery shows that ancient Egyptians actually used fairly sophisticated processing techniques. The conclusions, published in the July 26 Science, offer insight into the evolution of food preparation. They have even inspired a beer that made its debut earlier this month.

 Delwen Samuel, an archaeobotanist at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge in England, examined the samples with both optical and scanning electron microscopes. The bread loaves came from several ancient Egyptian sites, dating from 2000 to 1200 B.C. The beer residues were found at two sites where workmen lived--Deir el-Medina (1550 to 1307 B.C.) and Amarna (1350 B.C.).

 Samuel could distinguish the different baking methods from the shapes of the microscopic starch granules. "Unprocessed starch takes a spherical shape," she says, "but the round balls change shape if they've been processed. Heating causes them to swell and bend. Enzymes make pits and channels in the granules."

 From these features, Samuel deciphered several recipes for the bread. In one, the emmer wheat was allowed to sprout before being dried and ground into flour. The flour was then mixed with a lot of water, kneaded slightly, and baked, producing a dense bread.

 To verify the recipe, Samuel baked several loaves of the sweet, "rather tasty" bread. "When I looked at the microstructure, it matched [that of the ancient bread] very well," she says.

 She determined a basic recipe for ancient Egyptian beer too, although it was much more difficult because of beer brewing's complexity. The variety of starch granules on the pottery shards showed that Egyptian brewers used a two-part process. After sprouting the emmer grain to make malt, they divided it into two batches, cooking one and leaving the other alone. Then they mixed the two together and strained out the liquid for fermentation.

 Not to let this knowledge go to waste, Scottish and Newcastle Breweries in England came out with Tutankhamun Ale on July 2, brewed with specially grown emmer wheat and using methods based on Samuel's work. "They produced 1,000 bottles and sold them at Harrods," Samuel says. "As far as I know, they've all sold out."