Amish Friendship Bread - modern Stone Soup??
Published 8 months, 2 weeks ago in My life.A friend offered me a starter from her Amish Friendship Bread mix. It is a zip-lock bag of batter to which you add milk, flour and sugar periodically over a 10 day cycle to feed the yeast and then divide the batter to give out to friends. The last bit of batter you keep and use to bake the bread. The recipe of items to add includes flour, bicarb soda, baking powder, etc, etc and 2 boxes of instant vanilla pudding!
The whole process has been likened (by my gifting friend) to a very guilt laden chain letter. In my family we are thinking it is more like stone soup - with the bread starter being the stone. In fact I was so convinced that the range of ingredients could stand alone without the starter I thought I might try it. But because I am lazy as well as cynical I thought I would have a look on the internet first. Some bloggers thought the addition of baking soda and bicarb would actually negate the function of the starter .. and one like-minded soul had actually used a cup of butter milk instead of the starter and found the end result moister and more delicious. And to its credit, Buttermilk needs none of the daily mixing and intermittent adding of ingredients that its Amish counterpart does.
Final verdict - Amish Friendship Bread - high maintenance, troublesome and ultimately unfulfilling!
PS - will post a final update when I finally bake it!!
1 Response to “Amish Friendship Bread - modern Stone Soup??”
Leave a Reply
Your reply will not appear on the site until it has been approved
Hmmmm since the Amish strive to preserve elements of the late 17th century European rural culture, I somehow think that the baking soda and packet vanilla pudding may be a little “new fangled” for them. Perhaps the bread is Amish in name only. Only you can tell if the Friendship is.