I spent my nights off baking and cleaning and being a good little martha stewart, plotting this year’s garden and longing for chickens, sheep, and goats. First I baked a lovely roast chicken, complete with gravy, stuffing, and mashed potatoes whipped up in my fancy KitchenAid mixer. Then I went on to bake a little loaf of white bread - very good, and very simple, especially when using the mixer.

Then, last night (Saturday night to all you non-night owls), I baked up four loaves of Amish friendship bread from my starter, sealed off one starter package in the freezer to bake up for later, and left the final one lying on the counter to be mushed for another 9 days.

If you don’t know already, Amish Friendship Bread is made from a starter. You mush this bag of starter mix for about ten days, adding some more yeast-food stuff twice along the way, and on day ten, you bake your bread. You also get like, a bunch of excess starter, so you’re supposed to package it up and give it away to your friends so they can do the same. See? Friendship?

Well, it doesn’t usually work like that. See, nobody wants the stuff, because then they have to mush the darned bag for ten days, and find more friends to give it to, and pretty soon, your whole town is saturated in friendship starter, and everyone hates you. This has happened so often in my town that nobody will even take any starter from me when I ask.

But it just so happens that I didn’t have any - nor did I know anyone who had any - when I wanted some friendship bread, which is a moist quickbread not unlike banana bread or spice cake, so I dug up a recipe for starter and began growing it.

It’s simple.

Amish Friendship Bread Starter
1 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
1 package (2 1/4 teaspoons) active dry yeast

Pour all ingredients into a gallon size ziplock bag (make sure it’s a sturdy one, nothing cheap) and mush it together, and leave it on the counter (no need to refridgerate). Mush it every day (like, just a couple minutes to keep it mixing together) and add ingredients as follows:

Day 1: You just made the starter this day. Mush it.
Day 2: Mush mush.
Day 3: Carry on the mushing.
Day 4: Mush it some more!
Day 5: Add 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, 1 cup milk. Mush!
Day 6: Mush!
Day 7: Keep mushing.
Day 8: Mush it some more.
Day 9: And… some more.
Day 10: Add 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, 1 cup milk. Mush together, then…. Carry on making the bread as follows.

Get some ziploc bags. Put 1 cup of starter into each of 3 bags, seal, and date. You will be giving these away, or keeping them for yourself, or freezing them for later use. You should have approximately 1-1.5 cups of starter left with which you can make your bread. If you have more starter than this, continue to seal it up into bags until you only have 1-1.5 cups left. (The excess starter thing happened to me once. Dunno how….)

Put your starter (1-1.5 cups worth) into your mixing bowl. (Either a big stand mixer or a little hand mixer, or just a spoon and some arm power work fine.) Then add:

1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup applesauce
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 eggs
1/2 cup milk
2 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 large package (or 2 small packages) of instant vanilla pudding mix
Any nuts, raisins, dates, whatever you’d like, in 1/2 - 1 cup amounts. (I use… none. We don’t like that stuff.)

Preheat oven to 325. Mix everything up, pour into two greased 9×5 inch loaf pans. (I used that new Crisco spray, loved it way more than Pam!) Sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar if you’d like (I usually do.) Then bake for approximately 60 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted. Let cool for a wee bit, and then pop out of pans and let cool on a wire rack.

Eat. Enjoy.

You can freeze the starter mixture on day 10 if you’d like, or if you can’t find any suckers to pawn it off to. When you’re ready to make more bread, just take it out, let thaw for a day, and make the bread. There are other recipes/variations for bread out there on the internet. Next time around, I’ll be making some lemon flavored bread, with lemon extract and lemon pudding instead. We’ll see how that goes. :)

2 Comments »

1. No enemy making here. I’ve been wanting to make Amish friendship bread, but lost my starter long ago, don’t know anyone who has any and didn’t have a recipe to start my own. So, woo-hoo! Thanks!

   Comment by Turtleheart — February 28, 2007 @ 6:03 pm

2. what happens if you do refrigerate the mix!?!?!?

   Comment by angelee — June 26, 2007 @ 4:24 pm

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