November 22, 2008

How Many Friends Do YOU Have?

One of my coworkers gave me a bag of "Amish Friendship Bread Starter" on Friday. This is apparently a basic sourdough starter, passed around with a truly horrendous recipe for quick bread (why one needs a sourdough starter for a quickbread recipe that also includes baking powder is beyond me) that includes an entire package of vanilla pudding mix (oh, right: that's why you need all the leavening you can get).

Now, leaving aside the ridiculous idea that the Amish give each other plastic sacks of sourdough starter, or that they cook any recipes that involve pudding mix, I have my doubts that this even a severely bastardized Amish recipe, especially given the stories I've now read about it on the Internet.

For one thing, for people living the way the Amish do, it's not very friendly to give somebody with an established household a sourdough starter. It'd be like saying they're a disorganized dolt who can't keep a starter alive. Imagine, if you will, if somebody gave you a package of yeast. That's how odd it would be. Also, the thing Amish people give in friendship is actual cooked food, not ingredients. The idea of giving somebody a kit to cook with is fine and well in an average American household, but considering that the Amish cook everything from scratch, ingredients are not quite as romantic for them. So this is clearly not an Amish tradition at all.

That aside, I accepted the starter from the coworker, and will be using it to make some bread. There are some changes I will be making to the concept, though.

First, I'm going to lose the plastic Ziploc bag. Not only is handling plastic bags of liquid difficult and messy, but I don't care to use that much plastic for no good reason. Starters can grow very nicely in a glass jar, stirred daily instead of mushed.

Second, there's no way in hell I'm buying vanilla pudding mix, so I'll be making a more normal bread recipe (I found one that makes a nice banana bread, which sounds reasonable; I also have some sourdough recipes that will work with this starter; there are more recipes here).

Third, and this is really part of second, I don't cook with vegetable oil. Oil is always used as a substitute for butter, but it fails to have either the great taste or fine texture of butter. And it leaves a funny taste in the baked goods, which are already suffering by lacking the flavour of butter. I use cooking oil to make box brownies (one of the worst foods I eat, and my primary deviation from our largely locavore, all natural diet) or to deep fry.

Fourth, I'm not going to try to find three friends to give this stuff to every ten days. That's the catch for this recipe: you make this starter, feed it for ten days, and at the end you have four batches of it. One you use to make bread, the other three you package up and give away. Only, if you're anywhere near normal, you don't have that many friends who want more starter after a few rounds of this cycle.

The sane way of dealing with the whole reverse-Ponzi scheme of starter is to make three times as much bread at the end of the ten days. Or to make bread every five to seven days, thus reducing the amount of starter you have going forward. You can slow the entire cycle down by refrigerating the starter (or stop it by freezing it, but I lack for freezer room so that's not really an option).

Fifth, I can think of no reasonable reason why there should be strong prohibitions on metal implements in the mix. As long as you don't use really old cookware with weird mixed alloys, the yeast should be just fine. Most metal cooking implements are stainless steel, and I have had yeasts living in stainless steel just fine for long periods. I would probably not keep a starter in a metal container, but that's not for fear of hurting the starter -- it's because I have a lot of suitable glass jars, whereas I would have to go out and buy a metal container. I would definitely knead a yeasted bread in my Kitchenaid mixer, which has a metal bowl, and I don't see any reason for fearing metal measuring cups or mixing spoons (though all my spoons for baking are wooden, anyway). Just because somebody tells you something doesn't mean it's true. (See this thread about yeast and metal for more discussion of this topic.)

# Posted by ayse on 11/22/08 at 7:49 PM | Comments (1)