Seamus Blackley is a god in gaming circles, but he’d much rather talk about his bread. And while we’re happy to oblige, it’s helpful to know about his background to properly appreciate his unlikely passion.
The facts: In the early 1990s, Blackley, a particle physicist and part-time pilot, developed the influential flight simulator video game Flight Unlimited. He followed that up with 1998’s Jurassic Park: Trespasser, a wildly technical feat—and notorious flop—that nonetheless caught the eye of Bill Gates, who helped the developer land a gig at Microsoft.
There, Blackley convinced the mega-billionaire that his company—at the time best known for word processing and spreadsheet-making software—should launch its own gaming console using PC technology to rival Sony’s popular PlayStation line. Before long, Blackley assembled a team of engineers to build the system that would soon be known as the Xbox.
Despite developing the record-breaking console, which sold 1.5 million units in North America in just two months after its November 2001 release, Blackley left Microsoft a year later to pursue other ventures, including representing video game designers at Creative Artists Agency and most recently steering a startup called Pacific Light & Hologram.
But somewhere along the way, the tech titan decided what he’d really like to do—how he’d really like to tap some of that best-in-class brainpower—is make bread. Or, more specifically, resurrect ancient strains of yeast and source forgotten grains to recreate medieval European sourdough and a variety of ancient Egyptian breads.
So these days, you’ll find the father of the Xbox spending most of his free time baking around the house—a passion he picked up long before the rest of us decided to play with our own dough during the global quarantine.
Blackley’s ultimate goal now that he’s stuck at home: to build a fully functioning, historically accurate Egyptian bakery in his backyard. While you probably won’t make it that far with your pandemic pastries, you can still steal some inspiration from Blackley while you bide your time with bread.
An Ancient Art
While enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Blackley took a course in hieroglyphics as “a throwaway class,” but quickly grew obsessed with Egyptology, the study of ancient Egypt.
“The Egyptians wrote amazing, beautiful, clever things,” Blackley tells Popular Mechanics. He soon found out they were also highly skilled breadmakers that used a range of grains and baking techniques.
Blackley began exploring breadmaking’s archaeological background, marveling at yeast’s unique ability to “hibernate” for thousands of years when kept dry, only to be brought back to life with some warm water and sugar.
“So it occurred to me,” he says, “that if you had the microbes, you could essentially replicate bread as far back as you wanted.”
The thrill is in the pursuit of those microbes. To obtain them, baking enthusiasts track down ancient clay pots that were once used for beer or breadmaking, as both processes involve yeast.
“The Egyptians used pottery like we use plastic,” Blackley says. “They broke it, they threw it away. So we find these epic piles of trash pottery, and all of it is impregnated with whatever was in it.”
Archaeologists have long collected pottery containing remnants of ancient yeasts that can become embedded in what Blackley calls the “ceramic matrix”: bubbles that form in pottery when it’s being fired.
Rebuilding Bedja
Twitter/Seamus Blackley
Twitter/Seamus Blackley
Blackley is currently recreating an ancient Egyptian bread called bedja, named after the rounded cone-shaped pottery vessels in which they’re baked. Bedja, he says, “is the bread that we find was being baked and fed to workers on the Giza plateau, where the Great Pyramids are. It’s the oldest bread that we have records for and the most interesting, too, because it’s so different from the way we bake today.”
Many ancient baking enthusiasts run into problems sourcing the dormant yeast they need without contaminating or destroying ancient artifacts in the process. So Blackley recruited Twitter pal Serena Love, an Egyptologist, amateur beer brewer, and anthropologist at the University of Queensland in Australia. She’s been able to gain access to ancient pottery fragments housed in various research institutions including Harvard’s Peabody Museum.
Blackley and Love then enlisted the help of Richard Bowman, a microbiologist, gastroegyptologist, and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Iowa who could extract the yeast samples using specialized equipment without damaging the pottery. Right now, Bowman is running the yeast through a DNA sequencing process and hoping to verify its age and origins.
This liquid-based extraction process makes a significant difference in whether the yeast can be brought back to life and reused, thereby impacting the flavor and quality of the bread. Blackley said he’s seen other historical baking enthusiasts who have scraped clay pots and attempted to culture the yeast on their own.
Twitter/Seamus Blackley
“But when you do that,” Blackley says, “you’re basically getting museum dust or dirt from wherever it was buried,” which can throw off the flavor and texture of the bread completely. As a result, he’s trusted that portion of the work to microbiologists, taking back small samples to revive and bake in his home kitchen.
Experimental Archaeology
Blackley has recently been experimenting with a range of period-accurate ingredients, “starting with 100 [percent] Emmer, Barley, and Einkorn, moving through different fats from Linseed oil to Goat lard, all the way to flavorings such as Dates and Coriander.”
The difficulty in recreating the recipe, however, lies in figuring out the exact ingredient proportions, baking time, proper clay pot preparation, and temperature required for the perfect loaf. In short, there’s a lot of trial and error involved.
“There are real gaps, because there are two lines of evidence,” Love tells Popular Mechanics. “We have the artistic record, so we have what’s written in tomb scenes that are contemporary with the Egyptian pyramids in that time of the Old Kingdom, and then we have the archaeology. And there are questions on both sides,” including the kinds of fats needed to season the clay pots and the proportions of different kinds of flours. This “experimental archaeology,” she says, is where Blackley’s determined efforts come into play.
Blackley is baking the bedja in his kitchen, and recently attempted to replicate the Egyptian process, which is “basically like a controlled fire pit that’s shaped a little bit like an egg carton,” he says. “It has a bunch of slots for these bedja pots that you fill with dough, and they bake with residual heat.”
At the same time, from Australia, Love is sending Blackley any new information she finds and noting his results to include in an academic research paper they plan to eventually publish. As far as they can tell, no one else has successfully created a full-scale bedja bakery. And if their yeast DNA sequencing confirms the samples are genuine—they still need to collect more samples, ideally on location in Egypt—it would be groundbreaking Egyptology research.
For now, Blackley is continuing to bake, passing on the practice loaves to eager friends and family. The results have been light, airy, flavorful, and unlike anything he’s experienced in modern baking thus far, he says.
But beyond the mere challenge of baking bedja, Blackley says it’s important to prove the expertise and genuine deliciousness of ancient breads—treats crafted with the same amount of technical proficiency, tireless tenacity, and genuine affection that, say, veteran video game developers bring to their own beloved creations.
“Go to a museum and look for things that ancient people made. You know the Greeks made [ancient] computers, right?” he said. “They weren’t eating bad bread.”
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May 12, 2020 at 07:00PM
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Quarantine Baking | Xbox Creator Baking Ancient Egyptian Bread - Popular Mechanics
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