"Dee Dee" > wrote in message ups.com
> I guess I've been watching too many archealogy shows. Aren't they
> always finding some grains, fungi, etc. that "come alive." ;-))
There have been several reports of viable dry start found between
the pages of 50-year-old copies of Sourdough Jack's little book.
And, speaking of books, it is a good one, and the right size, about
50 spiral-bound pages. Copies can be found at eBay. (But
probably, by now, the dry starts that came with the books are
all used up.)
An Internet seller offering a "Gisa" culture suggests that it may be
descended from the times of the pharaohs. The proportion of the
time trip spent dry is not suggested, but the alternative is continuous
propagation. So far as I know, nobody has claimed to have scraped
a viable dry start out of an archaeological site.
Our resident scholar has pointed out that unattended sourdough cultures
die off pretty quick, and are not likely to form the kinds of spores that
would confer archival properties. Please see:
http://www.nyx.net/~dgreenw/howshoul...tarterfor.html
Well, that is mostly about moist culture storage. I know of no systematic
study about how long dried cultures last, and what the conditions of drying
and of storage should best be. Me and "Carlos" are trying to find out.
And, speaking of books, this one was mentioned recently:
http://www.twobluebooks.com/book.php
Some of that is available as a *.pdf file, including a section about
the way that gas bubbles in dough are stabilized. There it is said that lipids
(fat) can stabilize the bubbles, but quite a lot of lipid must be added to do that
and it must be polar. Otherwise the bubbles are stabilized by protein, and
adding small amounts of lipids is detrimental. There are pencil-drawn
diagrams and plots that make it quite clear. The role of fats was recently
under discussion at r.f.s., so that's why I mention it.
Anyway, I think I will buy that book before I buy the one about French bread
which the masked man recommended. (I will try to get the library to order
some books by Steven Laurence Kaplan.) (Otherwise maybe I will take
my chances reading random pages at Amazon com.)
--
Dicky