Life is like Amish Friendship Bread
 | Author:
Independent Record
Nancy Marks: MT43 News Secretary and News Editor |
Life is like Amish Friendship Bread
Independent Record
This article was originally published by the Independent Record on January 10, 2024.
There was a funny trend about 20 years ago, when people were giving each other Ziplock bags of mysterious beige goo. It was a starter, a living mixture of flour, water, and yeast that you had to feed and take care of, kind of like a pet. It was used to make Amish friendship bread, which was kind of like a coffee cake.
Amish friendship bread starter is pretty similar to a sourdough starter, but with the Amish friendship bread, the whole point is that over the course of ten days, you feed it so much and it grows so big that after you remove a portion to make the cake, you have enough to give four portions away, to four different people, so that they can start Amish friendship bread journeys of their own. And, even after giving all of that away, and using some of it to make the cake, you’re still left with enough starter to feed and take care of, so that the cycle can start again.
The problem is, that after a few cycles, you start running out of friends to give the starter to, not to mention all of the people to whom you’ve already given starters, who have to find friends of their own to share their baby starters with. After 30 days, if everyone stuck with it, feeding and growing and taking care of their starters and giving four new baby starters to four new people every ten days, you would have 80 Amish friendship bread starters being tended to, and growing, until they were ready to be divided and foisted upon the next group of unwitting starter caregivers. In just five months, there would be more than enough starters for every single person in world to have one of their own.
If you haven’t been lucky enough to be the recipient of one of these baby starters, you can make one for yourself by combining:
¼ cup room temperature water
1 package active dry yeast, about 2¼ tsp
1 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
The directions for how to care for your starter are as follows:
Day 1: Do nothing.
Taking care of an Amish friendship bread starter is a great metaphor for life. Like the first bag of starter you receive, the world is a gift, given to us with no strings attached. It is impossibly vast, and understanding it is beyond our imagination. This is why we speak of it through metaphor and story. We do nothing to be worthy of this gift. It has been given to us freely with grace and love.
Day 2: Mush the bag. Day 3: Mush the bag. Day 4: Mush the bag. Day 5: Mush the bag
Even though we did not create the world, that does not mean that we can neglect it. Heaven and earth mean different things to different people, but we all have to live together on this one tiny planet. When we care for the world, we take care of ourselves. When we are kind to one another, we are kind to ourselves. We don’t need to perform miracles. We just need to mush the bag.
Day 6: Add to the bag: 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of sugar, and 1 cup of milk. Mush the bag.
When you first receive your Amish friendship bread starter, it will be small, just one cup of soft beige paste. But as you care for it, it will grow, and soon it will be so much larger than the small amount that you received. We are like this when we come into the world, small and helpless, completely dependent on the people around us. But, over time, we grow and mature, and have our own experiences, as we begin to understand the wonder that surrounds us.
Day 7: Mush the bag. Day 8: Mush the bag. Day 9: Mush the bag. Day 10: Add 11/2 cups each of milk, flour, and sugar. Mix well. Reserve 5 cups of the starter and set aside.
To the remaining starter add:
4 eggs
1½ cups oil, or ½ cup oil and ½ cup applesauce
¾ cup milk
1½ cups sugar
3 tsp. cinnamon
¾ tsp. vanilla
2¼ tsp. baking powder
¾ tsp. baking soda
¾ tsp. salt
3 cups flour
1 large box of instant vanilla pudding
Grease the bottom of 2 loaf pans and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Pour the batter into the pans and sprinkle the top with sugar and cinnamon. Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool until the bread loosens from the pan easily.
Divide the reserved starter into five 1-cup portions. Save one portion for yourself and give the remaining four to your closest friends.
It is our responsibility to care for the people around us. We often talk about faith and science as if they were opposing forces, but this comes from a lack of understanding. The world is so complicated and impossibly huge, it’s no wonder that we have difficulty when we try to share our thoughts with each other. But, the world is always speaking to us, through the wind, the water, and the trees. Humanity speaks to us through the stories that we tell. The universe speaks to us through art and music. All of the mysteries of faith and the divine can even speak to us through Amish friendship bread.
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PhotoCredit: Photo Credits: Independent Record, Jan 10, 2024
Image 1 Caption: Reverend Charles Wei, minister of the Plymouth Congregational Church, Helena
Photo Credits: Independent Record, Jan 10, 2024
