Amish Friendship Bread is a type of bread or cake made from a sourdough starter that is often shared in a manner similar to a chain letter

Chain letter

A typical chain letter consists of a message that attempts to the recipient to make a number of copies of the letter and then pass them on to as many recipients as possible...

. The starter is a substitute for baking yeast and can be used to make many kinds of yeast-based bread

Bread

Bread is a staple food prepared by cooking a dough of flour and water and often additional ingredients. Doughs are usually baked, but in some cuisines breads are steamed , fried , or baked on an unoiled frying pan . It may be leavened or unleavened...

s, shared with friends, or frozen for future use. The sweet, cake-like Amish Cinnamon Bread is a common bread that is made from this starter; it is a simple, stirred quickbread that includes a substantial amount of sugar

Sugar

Sugar is a class of edible crystalline carbohydrates, mainly sucrose, lactose, and fructose, characterized by a sweet flavor.Sucrose in its refined form primarily comes from sugar cane and sugar beet...

 and vegetable oil, with a mild cinnamon flavor. It has characteristics of both pound cake

Pound cake

Pound cake refers to a type of cake traditionally made with a pound of each of four ingredients: flour, butter, eggs, and sugar. The traditional recipe makes a cake much larger than most families can consume, and so the quantity is often changed to suit the size of the cake that is desired...

 and coffee cake

Coffee cake

The term coffee cake can refer to either of the following:* A class of cakes intended to be eaten alongside coffee. Under this definition, a coffee cake does not contain coffee. They are typically single layer cakes that may be square or rectangular like a Stollen or loaf-shaped rectangular cakes....

. The flavor of the finished product can be altered by omitting cinnamon

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is a spice obtained from the inner bark of several trees from the genus Cinnamomum that is used in both sweet and savoury foods...

.

A common recipe using this starter suggests using one cup

Cup (unit)

The cup is a customary unit of measurement for volume, used in cooking to measure liquids and bulk foods such as granulated sugar...

 (240 ml) of it to make bread, keeping one cup to start a new cycle, and giving the remaining two cups to friends. The process of sharing the starter makes it somewhat like a chain letter. One cup of starter makes one standard loaf of bread.

History

There is no reason to think that the sweet, cinnamon-flavored bread has any connection to the Amish

Amish

The Amish , sometimes referred to as Amish Mennonites, are a group of Christian church fellowships that form a subgroup of the Mennonite churches...

 people, although the name is taken from them. According to Elizabeth Coblentz, a member of the Old Order Amish and the author of the syndicated column "The Amish Cook",
true Amish Friendship Bread is "just sourdough bread that is passed around to the sick and needy".

The recipe for Amish Cinnamon Bread may have first been posted to the internet in 1990, but the recipe itself is several decades old.

In 2011, a novel by author Darien Gee entitled Friendship Bread was published by Ballantine Books
, in which a bag of Amish Friendship Bread starter makes its way throughout the fictitious town of Avalon, Illinois, changing the lives of those it comes in contact with.

Obtaining starter

Starter can easily be created from scratch with a package of regular baker's yeast

Baker's yeast

Baker's yeast is the common name for the strains of yeast commonly used as a leavening agent in baking bread and bakery products, where it converts the fermentable sugars present in the dough into carbon dioxide and ethanol...

 and the ingredients that are used to maintain it. Also it is possible to create it in a baker's kitchen through natural wild yeasts

Sourdough

Sourdough is a dough containing a Lactobacillus culture, usually in symbiotic combination with yeasts. It is one of two principal means of biological leavening in bread baking, along with the use of cultivated forms of yeast . It is of particular importance in baking rye-based breads, where yeast...

. Typically, however, a friend

Friendship

Friendship is a form of interpersonal relationship generally considered to be closer than association, although there is a range of degrees of intimacy in both friendships and associations. Friendship and association are often thought of as spanning across the same continuum...

 shares a cup of the liquid yeast

Yeast

Yeasts are eukaryotic micro-organisms classified in the kingdom Fungi, with 1,500 species currently described estimated to be only 1% of all fungal species. Most reproduce asexually by mitosis, and many do so by an asymmetric division process called budding...

 culture with people who would like to make this bread. The starter is typically maintained by adding sugar

Sugar

Sugar is a class of edible crystalline carbohydrates, mainly sucrose, lactose, and fructose, characterized by a sweet flavor.Sucrose in its refined form primarily comes from sugar cane and sugar beet...

, flour

Flour

Flour is a powder which is made by grinding cereal grains, other seeds or roots . It is the main ingredient of bread, which is a staple food for many cultures, making the availability of adequate supplies of flour a major economic and political issue at various times throughout history...

 and milk

Milk

Milk is a white liquid produced by the mammary glands of mammals. It is the primary source of nutrition for young mammals before they are able to digest other types of food. Early-lactation milk contains colostrum, which carries the mother's antibodies to the baby and can reduce the risk of many...

 every few days, although any source of water and food for the yeast will work.

The instructions distributed with Amish Friendship Bread typically omit instructions on how to prepare starter from scratch, and frequently claim that the recipe is a secret "known only to the Amish".

Starter bread is also known as "The Mother Bread".

Controlling the starter cycle

A common cycle is based on the addition of one cup each of sugar, flour, and milk every five days, with bread baked and extra starter shared every tenth day. The ten-day cycle produces five cups of starter, which must be either used to bake bread, given away, or used to start a new cycle. A common suggestion is to bake one loaf of bread, give away three cups of starter, and to save the remaining one for the next cycle.

It is not necessary to wait the canonical ten days before using one cup of starter: a cup of starter can be used as a yeast substitute at any point. However, using starter on earlier days will result in a smaller quantity of starter at the end of the cycle. To avoid running out of starter, it is normal to feed the starter (add milk, sugar, and flour) before removing a cup for use, and most recipes assume that starter is always fed immediately before being removed. A five-day baking cycle feeds the starter every fifth day and uses the resulting mixture on that day to bake one or two loaves of bread (one cup per loaf). The remaining starter is reserved to begin the next five-day fermentation cycle.

Despite common instructions to the contrary, the starter can be frozen for later use, and the cycle begun anew after thawing. The cycle can also be slowed to about half the normal fermentation rate by refrigerating the starter instead of allowing it to ferment at room temperature

Room temperature

-Comfort levels:The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers has listings for suggested temperatures and air flow rates in different types of buildings and different environmental circumstances. For example, a single office in a building has an occupancy ratio per...

. Refrigeration is usually recommended if a few days' delay is desired.