Amish Friendship Bread Pt.1

A co-worker of my mother gave her a baggie of starter for the infamous Amish Friendship Bread (the gift that keeps giving or as some like to call it, the chain letter of cooking! mwh hahaha). For those who may not know anything about it, the starter is the beginning batter for this bread and it takes about a week, or more depending on the recipe, to get it ready to be mixed with all of the ingredients for the bread (it goes through its own fermenting process during the "week span" instead of using a store bought yeast).



Along the way (actually Day 3 of the instructions) it somehow became my project without me having any knowledge of my new responsibilty. Well since I didn't know that it was up to me to really master this thing, I ended up missing the first day that I was supposed to "feed" this thing (you have to feed the starter a mixture of the same ingredients it's made of on certain days). So I found out that it was ok and fed it on the next day and pretended like the previous day never existed in Starter World.

After some complications with getting all the ingredients together and finding a proper container to mix the stuff in, I finally reached the baking point! Earlier today I wore out my arm trying to mix everything together but I accomplished it!

The bad thing is that after baking the bread and letting it cool, I found out that the bread (with the exception of the top) was still...kind of raw-ish. It wasn't liquidy like its batter state (this bread was from batter instead of dough) but it did have an incredibly moist and mushy texture like it hadn't been completely baked. I looked online and found out that most of the same recipes required baking at 350 degrees (mine had stated 325) for 1 hour. So I reheated the oven to 350 and put the loaves back in for about 25 minutes and then left them in the oven until it cooled off. I tried some of the bread again and it still has the same consistency as before. :/ I'm guessing that it has too much apple sauce in it (and I'll go into more detail about that whenever I post the recipe).



I'll try to make another post (Part 2!) tomorrow that includes the recipe with more details of what I did along the way, since I do not have the recipe with me at the moment.

Though I do know the exact recipe for the starter that my batch came from so I'll go ahead and post it now (because it's so easy!).

Amish Friendship Bread Starter

1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup milk

(Warning: Those who do not enjoy the fine art of squeezing things may want to bribe someone into doing this for them, otherwise those lovely folks may be out of luck...and will not be able to continue the massive never-ending AFB chain!)

Pour ingredients into a gallon sized Zip-Lock bag, squeezing most of the air out, and seal. Squeeze the bag to mix the ingredients until well blended. Open the bag to squeeze out any excess air (and then make sure it's sealed again, heh). This will count as Day 1 of the process.