Science Memes

11091 readers

1612 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
Keep it rooted (on topic).
No spam.
Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

[email protected]

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

549

Cheese (mander.xyz)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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/

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Fascinating read, thanks!