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Ingredient Mon Nov 12 2007
Amish Bread Starter, Anyone?
A few days ago, a friend gave me a gallon-sized Ziploc baggie filled with about a cup of what looks like flesh-colored glue. In fact, it is a bread starter that ostensibly originated with the Amish, who reportedly are the only people in the world who have the recipe for the goo in question. In what essentially amounts to a chain letter made out of yeast, baggies of this starter are cultivated by one person and then passed along to three others with whom they want to share the joy that is Amish Friendship Bread.
It goes like this: the baggie comes with instructions to tend the starter for five days, feed it on the sixth day, tend to it for several more days, and ultimately bake a delicious, double batch of cinnamon-y sweet bread on the 10th day.
More specifically, tending to the bag involves “mushing” it and letting out any air that has accumulated due to fermentation. Feeding it means adding a cup each of milk, sugar and flour to roughly quadruple the contents. On the 10th day, according to the instructions, the baker feeds the starter once more, this time with a cup-and-a-half each of milk, sugar and flour. Then the baker divides the starter, leaving one cup in the batter bowl and depositing one cup of the mixture into each of three gallon-sized Ziploc bags to pass on to friends. (It occurs to me that perhaps this is all a racket, originating not with the Amish at all, but with the people behind Ziploc baggies.)
No matter. As a result of my experiment, I now have two delicious loaves of crunchy-on-the-outside, cakey-on-the-inside Amish Friendship Bread. I also have three bags of starter – and only one taker. The first two Chicagoans to respond to this post are welcome to a baggie, which I will lovingly mush until you take them off my hands.
christine / November 13, 2007 8:23 AM
As I was reading this post, I was thinking, "Man, I wish I knew someone who could pass this on. It sounds really good!" And now I'm one of the first two to comment!