Amish Friendship Bread – The Buck Stops Here

Amish Friendship Bread is the sour dough version of a chain letter. In true pacifist style, no one threatens you with bad luck, higher taxes or computer woes should you break the chain. However, by following the directions, you end up two loaves of mediocre cinnamon bread and four bags of starter. Since keeping the starter means you’ll be baking every 10 days, most people pass it onto soon-to-be ex-friends and relatives that owe them money — just to stay ahead of the dough.

There’s a veiled threat of eternal guilt with the claim that, “Only the Amish know how to make a starter, so if you give them all away, that will be it!” While I’m sure the food scientists could crack the code on this one in the time it takes to grease a loaf pan, I’m always up for something new, and accepted the offer. A few days later, I was delivered a bag of dough and the instruction sheets.

I quickly concluded the Amish are definitely not behind this. The tip off? The recipe uses two packages of vanilla instant pudding. Now I’m no food historian, but if you shun brass buttons and drive a horse-drawn buggy, you’re not going to use a highly processed instant food based on hydrogenated soybean oil, corn syrup solids and modified milk.

Judging by the instructions, the creator of Amish Friendship Bread is a marketer for Ziploc®. Not only does the recipe repeatedly call for Ziploc bags by name, you end up using four of the suckers. If everyone passes this recipe along, somebody at SC Johnson is going to be very, very rich.

Authenticity aside, the resulting loaf is moist and dense, but no better than my mom’s healthier zucchini bread. Since I wasn’t sold on its culinary virtue, I set aside the four cups of starter and decided to sleep on it.

This is what greeted me in the morning. The starter had spread over the counter and was threatening to eat the cat. I was too late to save the green elastic.

To give you an idea of just how much it expanded overnight, when I went to bed, the starter was right at the 4 CUPS line.

I’m going to be a real friend and save you from getting swept up in the madness. As Andrew exclaimed when he saw the dough-drenched counter, “Friendship my ass! It’s Amish World Domination Bread.”