Amish Friendship Bread by Richard Sprawson

Amish Friendship Bread Amish Friendship Bread a family favorite. It’s a quick bread, meaning that you don’t need to let the bread rise. This sweet sourdough starter recipe makes enough to bake your own loaf of quick bread and then to share with two friends, which is a traditional with this recipe. In an age where baker’s yeast was rare and not always available the common baker needed a way to make bread without relying on baker’s yeast. Most kinds of bread making requires flour, water, salt and a leavening agent. You mix it all together, let it rest for a while, form it, leave it for a while and its ready to bake. Sourdough is a bread that is made without the use of baker’s yeast, it leavens by growing natural yeast and that gives it its distinctive sour taste. Sourdough thought to have originated in Ancient Egypt has been made for thousands of years long before there was cultivated yeast, A sourdough starter that will be used for making the dough needs to be made to grow wild yeast. Perhaps the recipe has the name”Amish” added to it color. Certainly the idea that you make a dessert from scratch and that you share a recipe and starter with friends is becoming quaint in our modern world.The Amish are a people famous for their simple way of life and their reluctance to adopt modern conveniences. Maybe that’s why the “Amish” part seems to resonate: you can imagine horse and buggy people making this bread and dropping by a neighbor’s house for a bring and share. On May 12 I received a Ziploc storage bag containing a portion of starter mix. The mix contained fermented starter mix that my friend Jenny had made and fermented from the starter mix she had received from a friend. Along with the starter mix I received a set of instructions. The idea is that each person that receives the fermented starter mix makes a record of the day. If you want to make this bread and have a starter mix you will have to make your own. Just put one cup of milk, 1 envelope of dry yeast, 1 cup of sugar and 1 cup of flour into a Ziplock bag. Close and mash the bag until the liquid and solids are combined. Don’t put any metal spoons in there to mix with rather you mash the bag to mix the ingredients. On day 10 after you received your starter add 1.5 (one and one-half) cups of flour, 1.5 cups of sugar and 1.5 cups of milk in a non metal bowl. Next divide up the batter and split it into equal 1 cup starter kits in 4 Ziploc 1 gallon bags. Keep one of the starter kits for yourself and give others away to your friends. Encourage them to do the same. Be sure to give them these directions so that they know how to make the Amish Friendship Starter mix. Once you give away your starters, keep the one cup of starter and start the process over again, but leave out the yeast. You don’t need to add any more yeast, because the yeast is still alive and growing as you keep feeding it with sugar and flour and milk. So every 10 days you will be making starter and giving it away. It is this chemical process that

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makes the bag expand with air.

Here’s how to make the bread loaves. Take 1 cup of starter mix and place in a bowl add 3 eggs, one-half cup of milk, 2 teaspoons of cinnamon, one-half teaspoon of salt, 1 large box of Instant vanilla pudding. Also add 1 cup of raisins, 1 cup of Diamond Walnuts chopped, and 1 cup of chocolate chips. Now add three-fourths cup of melted butter or margarine, add 1 cup of sugar and one-half teaspoon of vanilla. Add 2 cups of flour. briskly mix all the ingredients together. Grease two loaf pans with butter. In a separate bowl mix half teaspoon of cinnamon with half a cup of sugar with and sprinkle this inside the greased bread pans. Now pour out the bread batter into your loaf pans. Bake the bread for 60 minutes. Be sure to let the bread cool for at least 10 minutes before removing from the bread pans. as it cools the bread to shrinks away from the sides of the pans. There is more to this than just a recipe – it’s a way of thinking. From our fast moving world almost everything comes pre-packaged and designed for instant gratification to those days not so very long ago when everything we did took time and where bread that took 10 days to make did not seem so extraordinary. Now with the remaining 3 bags of starter mix, keep one for yourself and give the other two away. You will make lots of friends this way. As long as you have starter mix you can keep it out fermenting and every 10 days separate it and start the process again. Hope you don’t run out of friends to give this to!