Friendship bread
A couple times in my life someone has given me “Amish Friendship Bread”. It’s probably not Amish; it is a sweet bread and it’s an expression of friendship—or desperation. It is a loaf of baked bread, a plastic bag containing about a cup of starter, and instructions. The instructions say to add water, flour, and a couple cups of sugar to the starter over the course of a couple weeks; then bake bread, using their recipe with some of the starter as yeast. Bag some starter to send with each loaf you give away, and copy the instructions for them, too. The bread produced with this recipe is sweeter than sandwich bread but not as sweet as say, banana bread.
The instructions I received called for several cups of sugar and a couple cups of flour during the feeding stage, a little at a time. I kept it in a gallon plastic bag with a zipper, easy to open and close, durable enough to mash the bag rather than stir with a spoon. After being fed, the starter produced a lot of air, which then had to be let out of the bag before it popped. A couple days later, feed it again, let the air out again, remember to feed it again, let the air out again, and then make bread with it, bag the results and give it away. So basically, babysitting this bag of starter and then guilting someone else into babysitting it so they could express their friendship in a tangible, edible way, including passing on the starter.
What got me was the fact that the sugar almost all disappeared into the air; after feeding and burping, the baby—I mean starter—wasn’t much more than before. It got expensive to turn that much sugar into air, with small results. I didn’t even think much of the resulting bread. It was good but not great, certainly not worth spending that much sugar and flour on a cup of starter per loaf.
I kept my starter going the first time, following the directions slavishly so as to know what the results would be. It was interesting; I learned how the starter worked. The second time I made bread with the last of the starter and so got rid of it. My children ate it. They didn’t pay any particular attention to it, but they also didn’t reject it.
I’m remembering this now, thinking how I hated babysitting a starter and being required by the directions to make bread on this particular day, regardless of what else I had planned for that day. I hated spending that much sugar; it’s expensive to the point that buying Halloween candy to give out is cheaper than buying sugar to make treats. On the other hand, the resulting bread tasted better than the whole wheat bread I’ve made from instant yeast. To be fair, my own whole wheat bread has not been sweet bread but sort of a neutral, ordinary bread, suitable for savory sandwiches and for peanut butter and jelly. Maybe that’s why I don’t enjoy my average bread. It’s average.
