posted
My wife was given a packet of Amish Frienship bread and the not-so-secret instructions that can only lead to the destruction of the world.
It seems that this "Friendship" bread is a nice zip-lok bag of living yeast and its food. They call this the "Starter" mixture.
After 10 days of daily manipulation of this starter mixture, you add some milk, flour, and sugar, than take out 4 cups of the dangerous concoction, and put them in four new zip-lok bags. You have created four new starter mixtures. Pass these bags, along with copies of the recipe (The Scroll of Doom) on to friends, relatives, anyone who isn't looking.
With the rest of this concoction, you make a couple loafs of delicious bread.
So every 10 days you have two loaves of bread, and four new packets of the "Starter Mixture". If you do not destroy any of those packets, 10 days later you will have 8 loaves of bread and 16 packets.
Within 100 days you'll have 1,000,000 packets.
Within 200 days, you'll have enough packets to give to every person on earth.
Within a year the whole world will be covered in Amish Friendship Bread and what's left of humanity will have to fly to the stars to escape. Of course, anyone bringing one of those starter packets onto my spaceship will be shown out the front door, preferably at an altitude exceeding 200 miles. (Any closer and they might survive a landing on the soft cushy bread covered ground below).
My wife's solution, and you know how illogical and unpractical women can be, was to ask, "can't we just not take out the 4 cups of yeast? Just one or two to of the Starter kits set us up for cooking next week when we run out."
So, assuming anyone is familiar with this dangerous and delicious threat (The bread, not my wife) what adjustments do we need to make to the recipe if we only remove a cup or two of the starter mixture.
posted
I had a friendship bread mix where the making it up recipe called for the addition of pudding. Pudding!
My recollection of friendship bread is I would often neglect it and it would start to turn a color my husband deemed unnatural, and it would wind up being thrown out.
But for real, most recipes, if you look at them, call for roughly 1 part liquids to 3 parts flour. Sugar interacts with this in strange ways. You'd think it's a solid, but in contact with liquid it makes things wetter somehow. Fat/oil is sort of a liquid, but it also generally adds "elasticity" to the recipe (not the product) where the ratios are not quite so unforgiving. And above all, when making up your own baked recipes, never underestimate the value of a little salt. For one thing it tastes good, but each salt molecule holds 52 molecules of water. This causes lumps of flour infiltrated with salt to explode on contact with water.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
We did friendship bread (with pudding) when I was growing up. It made the rounds several times around my brother's cub scout troop, for at least 4 years (that I remember.)
It was deliciousness.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
We did friendship bread (with pudding) when I was growing up. It made the rounds several times around my brother's cub scout troop, for at least 4 years (that I remember.)
It was deliciousness.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
I've seen Friendship Bread infect families, cliques, and whole neighborhoods. The agony and despair it leaves in its wake -- especially after the initial euphoria -- is something that no one who's witnessed it can ever forget.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
On day ten you should have slightly over 5 cups of mixture. After you take out the four cups of new "starter" you have just over one cup to use in the recipe. So instead of giving away starter, take out one cup to save as your next starter, divide the rest into 4 parts and make 4 recipes worth of bread.
Posts: 9866 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
Here's an even easier (EDIT: easier than changing recipes) solution: store whatever starter you don't need to make the bread in the refrigerator, and take it out as needed to make more loaves. The cold slows the colony down enough that you don't have to feed it for a while (usually no more than a week). For long term storage, use the freezer. For the better part of a year, I kept an Amish friendship bread starter in the freezer, taking it out only to make sourdough brownies (it doesn't completely freeze, so it's easy to scoop out what you need). When it started to get low, I'd let it warm up and feed it, then freeze it again.
Another trick is to find other ways to use it than just the bread. Here is my sourdough brownie recipe (this is a very dense, fudgy brownie):
1/3 C. butter 2 squares baking chocolate 1 egg, beaten 1/2 C. Amish friendship bread starter 1 tsp vanilla 3/4 C. flour 1 C. sugar 1/2 tsp salt 1/2 tsp baking soda
Melt butter and chocolate in saucepan. Set aside to cool. Mix together dry ingredients in a bowl. Add remaining ingredients to saucepan, stir. Combine wet and dry ingredients. Pour into greased 8x8 baking pan. Bake 20-25 minutes at 375F, or until edges pull away and a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.
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I absolutely love cultured foods, so it always makes me happy to see people get introduced to them, even if reluctantly . You never know, Dan_raven, this might be the start of a life-long obsession with wild cultures for your wife.
posted
Or do what I did and toss the extras. Wasteful I know. But I could only give so many starters away. I considered leaving them in parked cars at church (ala zucchini ) but in the AZ desert that really wasn't a wise idea Posts: 1132 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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posted
I think it's probably illegal to mail soudough starter without a permit, or I'd send you some, Tom.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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What does Sasha have to say about all this? (Just seems like with a world-conquering living mass of dough in your house, there must be a Sasha story in there somewhere . . .)
Posts: 3149 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I've seen Friendship Bread infect families, cliques, and whole neighborhoods. The agony and despair it leaves in its wake -- especially after the initial euphoria -- is something that no one who's witnessed it can ever forget.
Actually, I think the correct spelling is "Friendship" Bread.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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posted
I remember being nine or so and wondering how a jar of pink goo meant that my mom and that lady were friends.
Posts: 3936 | Registered: Jul 2000
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Dang baby stealing my brain cells...
