Starters: Amish Friendship Bread

When I was little I loved loved loved sourdough stuff. We had a sourdough starter that my mom kept in the back of the fridge, and I thought that "feeding" the sourdough was the coolest thing ever. Plus, my dad made some pretty awesome sourdough pancakes, and we often had sourdough bread and rolls. Somewhere along the way the sourdough vanished....I'm not sure if it got left behind in one of our many moves, or if my mom just decided it was too much work, but the sourdough pancakes just stopped appearing on Saturday mornings.

I've been thinking about trying to start a sourdough of my own, and I'd bookmarked several recipes, but then one of Noel's co-workers gave me an Amish Friendship Bread starter, and I figured I might as well give this a shot since I already had the starter.

Basically you "feed" the starter once, on day six of its cycle, and then on day ten you bake two loaves, and get four more starters out of it. You're supposed to pass the new starters on to friends (a culinary chain letter of sorts), hence the name. The starter itself looks a little disturbing, it's very bubbly and lumpy, and it smells awful--somewhere between sour milk and really strong beer. But at least you only have to smell it twice, when you feed the batter once, and when you mix it into bread at the end.

The final result is a very sweet, soft quick bread, with a faint sourdoughy tang in the background. The original recipe calls for a lot of cinnamon, I've made it that way twice, and it's really good warm. One time I tweaked the recipe to make a chocolatey version, which didn't quite taste right warm, but was delicious cold. I'm thinking next time I might try butterscotch, or maybe lemon. It's been fun having new tasty bread every ten days though, and I've been giving one of the loaves away each time, which makes other people happy too, so I figure it's good all around. Except for the horrendous smell of the starter....

Amish Friendship Bread

1 cup amish bread starter

3 eggs

1/2 cup milk

1 cup oil

1 cup granulated sugar

1/2 tsp vanilla

2 tsp cinnamon

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda
2 cups flour

2 small boxes vanilla instant pudding

First--don't use metal bowls or spoons when making this. I'm not sure why, but it was in CAPITALS in the instructions I got. Combine the last six ingredients, set aside this dry mixture. Mix together the wet ingredients, then stir in the dry. Lightly grease two 8 x 4 inch loaf pans. Mix an additional 1/4 cup sugar and 1/2 tsp cinnamon, dust the pans with half of this mixture. Pour the batter into the pans, and sprinkle with the rest of the cinnamon sugar. Bake for 50-60 minutes at 325 degrees. Cool on wire racks until bread loosens from the pan (about 10 minutes), then carefully remove loaves to cool further. Wrapped well in foil this will keep for up to a week.

Variation: reduce cinnamon to 1/2 tsp, use chocolate pudding mix instead of vanilla, substitute one tablespoon of flour with one tablespoon of cocoa powder, and stir in 1/2 cup of mini chocolate chips. Sprinkle the loaf with just plain sugar instead of cinnamon-sugar, and bake as directed above. (Sadly, I forgot to take pictures of the chocolate loaves, but they actually turned out better than the regular ones, they rose better.)

So if you want a starter, let me know. I've got lots!