Amish Friendship Bread – What is it, and how to make it?

10 days ago I received a ziplock bag with a goo-y substance in it. The mushy stuff was accompanied by two sheets of paper, titled “Amish Friendship Bread”. Googling it I found that this is a sort of culinary chain letter, where the idea is to give your your “letters” (dough) to friends, and who knows… maybe a bag of batter will return to you some day. And if you want you can type out and personalize the recipe as well, of course, to make it even more like a chain letter.

But you can of course also just download one of the letters from the Internet…

Here is my version of the accompanying letter (in PDF) – this way you do not have to type it up yourself. Or you can use this letter to make a new starter mix, and start a new chain.

What you receive in the bag is a sour dough starter mix for a bread or a cake. The starter is a substitute for baking yeast; it can be used to make many kinds of yeast-based breads. The starter mix can be shared with friends, or frozen for future use. If you follow the receipe you will get something in between a pound cake and a coffee cake, with a cinnamonny flavour.

You can start this mix from scratch, if you want, with a package of regular baker’s yeast and the ingredients that are used to maintain the starter mix (adding sugar, flour and milk every few days; see Amish Friendship Letter).

More information about the Amish Friendship Bread can be found on Wikipedia.