I love baking bread. I’ve made bread from whole wheat, white flour, spelt, einkorn, quinoa, barley and amaranth. I’ve made buckwheat bread, rice bread, oatmeal bread. I’ve made gluten-free bread, sourdough and beer bread. Over all my years of making bread, the one thing about it that still amazes me is how forgiving bread can be. I’ve made bread out of everything. Almost.

The one thing I never tried to make bread out of is a 5,300-year-old mummy. But I guess it does make really good bread.

Making Mummy Bread probably wasn’t the microbiologists’ main goal when they first took bacterial inventory of the Bronze Age cadaver nicknamed Oetzi The Iceman, whom German hikers found in 1991, frozen in the Italian Alps. Oetzi proved to be one of the best-preserved examples of what an ancient human was like. He still had his teeth and hair and tattoos. Next to his body lay his bow and arrows, his copper ax and his assortment of medicines.

Most remarkable, however, is that, although he walked the earth a thousand years before the pyramids of Egypt were built, Oetzi’s stomach contents were still intact. It was determined he had eaten red deer, goat and einkorn wheat the day before he was shot to death by an arrow in the back. The ancient einkorn cake Oetzi ate wasn’t bread as we know it today, but hard, unleavened coarsely ground mixture of grains, more like a tough cracker.

“What we didn’t expect to find was yeast,” Mohamed Sarhan of the Eurac Research Institute recently told CBS News. “If you tell anyone you have yeast, they immediately ask, ‘Can we use it for bread?’”

So, of course, they had to try it. Granted, these are biologists, not bakers. But they kept trying to revive Oetzi’s yeast and after three months, they succeeded. Sarhan chuckled, “We had very, very good sourdough!” Made from a 5,300-year-old corpse that looks like 40 pounds of beef jerky with eyes. Yum.

People have tried to make bread from tree bark, ants, stinging nettles, saw dust and seaweed. They have made bread with blood, limburger cheese and squid ink for black bread. In the story “Jack and the Beanstalk,” the giant threatens to eat Jack, chanting, “I’ll grind his bones to make my bread!”

As it turns out the giant never gets to make bread out of Jack—which is probably just as well for everyone involved. While bones might provide bulk, they lack the necessary starch and gluten for nice, soft, fluffy bread. You have to give the giant credit for being willing to experiment in the kitchen, but imagine how disappointed he would have been to go to all that trouble only to discover that his bone bread didn’t rise.

Coming off their success with mummy sourdough, the scientists at the Eurac Research Institute are ready for their next challenge. When a reporter asked if they had thought about using Oetzi’s yeast to brew Mummy Beer, Dr. Sarhan replied, “It’s on our list.”