Kitchen Tip Tuesdays: Amish Friendship Bread Half Feeding

I thought of another tip. This is about Amish Friendship Bread. You know that starter that someone gives you in a big ziplock bag? You have to "mush" the bag for 5 days, & on the the 6th day you "feed it" 1 cup milk, 1 cup four, & 1 cup sugar. You feed it this same amount of milk, flour, & sugar on day 10, & then it's baking day. After you've "fed" the mixture on baking day, you have 4 new starters, plus 1 cup of batter that you use to make the loaf of delicious cinnamon bread. You usually give 3 starters away to friends, & keep 1 starter for yourself to start all over again (it's day 1 for these starters), & bake one batch of cinnamon bread. It's great...at first. After a few cycles of 10 day periods, you run out of friends to give starters too. Or, all your friends have already had this experience, & they quickly tell you ""NO!" when you offer them a starter. LOL It just gets hard after a while when you can't get rid of, I mean, you can't give away all your extra starters. If you have a hard time wasting things, you end up making several batches of bread on baking day. There are great variations to this recipe so you end up making not just cinnamon bread, but lemon poppyseed muffins, chocolate coffee muffins, caramel apple bread or muffins, & the list goes on & on. It's wonderful to have a freezer filled with so many different kinds of bread & muffins. But it really does make baking day every 10 days a lot of work.

Well, I had a starter in the freezer & I decided to get it out & have another go at it (it had been 3 years since I had done it). After 3 cycles or so I hit that time where I couldn't get rid of my starters anymore. I found a GREAT tip online. I can't find the link now. I was sure I saved it to favorites so I could link to it, but now I can't find it anywhere. You can actually give your bread "half feedings".
Instead of 1 cup each of the flour, milk, & sugar, you can feed it it a half cup of all of those ingredients. And the result? On baking day, you end up with 3 cups, which means you only have 2 starters & then 1 cup to make a batch of bread with. So you can bake 1 batch, save a starter for yourself, & then have 1 starter left over to either give away or just make a second batch.
On baking day I have been making 2 batches. It's not hard to do, I make them both at once. If I make bread, it means 4 loaves of bread. 4 loaves of bread to bake every 10 days is much more managable.
Another tip for this amish bread is that you can use a bundt pan in place of 2 loaf pans. So if you do it that way, every 10 days you make two bundt loaves, & then only 1 starter to keep going.
And when you get tired of it all & you need to stop, just put that 1 starter in the freezer & you can start the whole thing up later.

So if you've done this before & cringe when someone offers you a starter, try giving it another chance & only give your starter half feedings. It works really well & that bread really is so good!

I'm going to start posting some of the variations I'm been making, which can take the form of breads, bundt cakes, muffins, & yesterday I even made cookies.

To see more Kitchen Tips, please visit Tammy's Recipes!