Ancient Astronaut Grain Bread
“This isn't your granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's granfather's bread!”
The ancient astronaut theory starts with a simple and deeply inconvenient observation: human civilization advanced too quickly. The gap between primitive stone tools and the precise engineering of the Egyptian pyramids, Puma Punku, and Göbekli Tepe is not adequately explained by the archaeological record. What is found instead are carvings of figures in what appear to be helmets and suits, ancient texts describing gods who descended from the sky in vehicles of fire, and construction achievements that engineers today struggle to replicate with modern equipment. The theory holds that extraterrestrial beings visited Earth thousands of years ago, were interpreted as gods by the civilizations they encountered, and either directly built or provided the knowledge to build structures that should not exist given the technology of the period.
The visitors did not stay. What they left behind was knowledge, selectively distributed, and a species that has spent the intervening millennia trying to remember what it was told. Agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, architecture are the foundational pillars of human civilization, and they appear in the historical record not gradually but suddenly. Erich von Däniken documented this in 1968. The academic establishment dismissed it. The pyramids remain. Göbekli Tepe, a site 7,000 years older than Stonehenge, was deliberately buried by whoever built it, for reasons no one has satisfactorily explained. The grains they cultivated, emmer, einkorn, spelt, are still with us. Whoever taught us to grow them may not have been from here, but they did leave us this great bread recipe.
Ingredients:
2 Cups warm water
1 ½ teaspoon salt
¾ teaspoon active dry yeast
1 cup bread flour
1 ¾ cups spelt flour
1 cup einkorn flour
Instructions:
Mix together your ingredients in a medium-sized bowl with a spoon until all the flour is incorporated.
Cover with saran wrap and let this sit at room temperature for 12-18 hours.
The next day, heat the Dutch oven in your oven to 485 degrees. Let this heat for about 30 minutes, you want the pan to be really hot. Be sure to put the lid on it, so the inside will heat up really hot too.
Flour your surface and gently turn the dough out onto the surface.
You won't want to overmix it at this point, so carefully fold it over a few times to form a loose ball.
Place on a piece of parchment paper, sprinkle with flour, and score the top.
Remove the Dutch oven from the hot oven carefully, this will be hot. Place the parchment paper with the dough on it inside the Dutch oven.
Move to the oven, and cook this for 30 minutes covered.
Remove the lid, and lower the heat to 425 degrees. Let this cook for 15-20 minutes. The top should be a deep golden brown.
Take it from the oven and carefully remove the bread from the pan.
Let it cool at room temperature for at least an hour before cutting into it.
Conclusion
This ancient grain bread is dense, nutty, and built to last, much like the civilizations that first cultivated these grains under circumstances that remain unexplained. The original recipe may have come from somewhere beyond our solar system, but it pairs well with butter regardless.