Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Amish Friendship Bread Part 1



On Friday March 14, (I know, a long time ago) I cooked the "friendship bread". First I have to explain the theory behind this. Ten days before that Friday, my friend Cynthia gave me a plastic bag with bubbly batter in it and a set of instructions (copied below). I had to mush the bag every day for ten days, and on the sixth day add some sugar, flour, and milk. After ten days I added more milk, sugar, and flour and put a cup of it each into 4 new bags to give out to friends. Then I baked the bread with some stuff added to the remaining batter. Sounds cool doesn't it? I think the batter in the bag contained yeast because it bubbled and made gas.
When it was finally time to bake, I saw that after taking out batter to give out to friends, there was barely any left, and that what I was adding to it could have been its own recipe as a quick-bread. This was a bit disappointing because even though the bread was delicious, I expected something (for lack of a better word) cooler.
The resulting bread was sweet and cinnamony in a good way. We ate it for breakfast dipped in milk or coffee. Also, I replaced half of the flour by whole wheat flour because I like the taste and texture, and I cut down on the pudding mix. I don't get why you need pudding mix, and I will have to try the recipe without. I think the recipe should be perfectly do-able without the "friendship starter."
Since I only managed to give out one of the 4 bags I had separated, I decided to keep the 3 bags and bake the batter itself to try to form real bread. Wish me luck...

Now for the recipe! (It's copied from Cynthia's email) I included the steps for the first couple of days in case you want to know, but I don't think the yeast-flour-sugar-milk mixture is necessary.

day 1: you get the bread (batter) today, do nothing to it

days 2-5: mush the bag
you just knead it around in the bag for about a minute or so

day 6: add 1 cup flour, 1 cup milk and 1 cup sugar.... then mush the bag so it all gets mixed
let the air bubbles out too because when i got to this part it was so full the bag broke

day 7-9: mush the bag

day 10:
1. pour contents into a non-metal bowl and add 1.5 cups each of: flour, sugar, milk... stir until smooth
2. measure out 4 separate batters of 1 cup each and put each into a one gallon ziploc bag (4 bags total)
these bags are for giving out to friends, also copy this sheet or something to tell them what to do
you might want to keep one for yourself if you want to make it again in another 10 days
3. remaining batter is to be baked into the bread, here’s how you do it
first you add...

3 eggs
1 cup oil (or 1/2 cup oil, 1/2 cup applesauce)
1/2 cup milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 cup sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
1.5 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups flour
1 large box or 2 small boxes of pudding mix, preferably vanilla or banana (I don’t know if you actually need this, but it was on the recipe)

then mix it all together

grease two loaf pans
mix together 1/2 cup sugar and 1.5 tsp cinnamon, use some of this to dust the pans (I didn’t do the topping)
pour the batter in and use remaining cinnamon/sugar mix to sprinkle onto the batter
bake for 1 hour (45 min if convection oven) at 325 degrees
cool for 10 minutes

2 comments:

claire said...

lol you took it from her??

hmmm... i wonder how cynthia got it, anyway...

Unknown said...

she got it from one of her friends! I took it because I'm interested in fod and wanted to see what it was.