Beer, Bread, Cheese — and Penicillin

When we talk about the microbiome, people think about the colon and trillions of microorganisms. Have you ever considered that humans have other interactions with microbiomes that occur with our cooking? On this week’s episode of FORK U, we continue with our series “Food That Made Civilization.” The topic is Fermentation.

How Fermentation Built CivilizationWe were selecting a microbiome without knowing it. Bacteria, yeast, and molds. Feed the ones that worked, keep the conditions they liked, and do it again.

Your grandmother may have kept the bowl that made better bread. She saved some of yesterday’s dough to start tomorrow’s. Others learned that milk mixed with a bit of salt and kept in a goat’s stomach became yogurt or cheese instead of something that had to be thrown away.

In Asia, they salted cabbage, put it into a jar, and buried it, which allowed them to survive the winter. And perhaps in what is modern-day Iran, they learned that when they crushed grapes, stored them in special containers, they made wine. And in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), ancient Sumerians left written recipes of barley brewing dating back over 5,000 years, which was probably beer.

There were no microscopes or bacterial cultures. We didn’t know that yeast metabolized sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, or that lactic-acid bacteria changed the chemistry of cabbage and milk.

But what they didn’t see was a colony of bacteria, yeast, and mold, creating environments in which organisms thrived, and transformed foods into something more edible and even stable for preservation.

Those microorganisms gave us bread, beer, wine, cheese, kimchi, vinegar, and eventually penicillin.

What Did Ancient Beer Taste Like?We are fascinated by what people before us ate and drank.

From the Midas Tomb in ancient Phrygia, now Turkey, they discovered that people had made a fermented drink from barley, grapes, and honey. It was probably beer, wine, and mead in the same cup.

Based on a chemical analysis of these vessels, Dogfish Head Brewery used modern yeast to make a beer called Midas Touch. But I wished we could have cultured the yeast and bacteria from one of those vessels?

As much effort as Dogfish used to reproduce the ingredients on the basis of chemical analysis, the beer is not the same. The barley, grapes, and even the water are different. Some of those grape varieties may not even exist anymore. The temperature and storage conditions we are guessing at best. And the microbes undoubtedly changed over the three thousand years while waiting to resume their shift.

Dogfish Head analyzed ingredients from pottery in China. That 9000-year-old pottery once held a fermented beverage made from rice, honey, and fruit. This was being drunk years before the Great Wall was built. Which makes me think, the Great Wall was the velvet rope, seeing if your name was on the list for the rice wine party.