here's life

I got some starter from a friend a week or two ago, so the time came this evening to make it into bread. Suprisingly, the recipe calls for baking soda and baking powder. It went together easily enough, and I didn’t need to knead or rise it, just dump it in pans, and put it in the oven. It cooked, and was pretty good, but I am wondering how much of its characteristics are a result of the Starter, and how much is in the chocolate chips that I put in it.

The recipe claims that “only the Amish know how to make a starter” but if so, the Amish seemed to have leaked the information to the internet—their secret formula of water, yeast, sugar and flour is now out for the world to see.
I figured that if it sits on the counter and grows, surely I can use it to make regular yeast bread. Whenever you feed the starter, you add equal amounts of flour, sugar and milk, so I should be able to substitute a cup of starter for 1/3 cup water, 1/3 cup flour, and 1/3 cup sugar, and put it in my bread machine…
It was supposed to be rising, according to the display on the machine, but the bubbles seemed to not be doing anything. I guess the yeast does need some help from the chemical leaveners. So, I add a teaspoon of yeast and restart the cycle. The machine is kneading and kneading this stringy liquid sillyputty, and doesn’t seem alive—it does smell yeasty, however. But, I lose faith in the automation of this process, and put it in a bowl and stick it in the fridge for later. We’ll see if it rises as it cools. It didn’t look right, but I don’t often see the dough as it is being made; the machine is handily fill-and-forget.

Seems like the only thing that you could get from Amish Friendship Bread that you don’t get from regular bread is more gluten (well, you might get friends too, or at least strengthen the interaction within your community). The way I figure, yeast is pretty monivorous: it eats carbohydrates, sugars and starches. So, if you have the culture sitting on your counter for a week and a half, it is devouring the starches, and since you keep adding milk, sugar and flour, the leftover proteins build up. This then makes for softer bread. Another possibility is that it is true about the Amish being the only ones capable of creating a starter right, and the simple yeast-and-water recipe I found was much simpler than the complex set of eating and growing things that make for extra special properties to the bread—like it tastes better or something. I couldn’t tell over the cinnimon and chips.

I guess I’ll turn it into bread tomorrow.

One of the nifty things about having bread starter, is it fills a need in people to grow things. To make something out of nothing, to nurture life that multiplies into more life. So, even if the starter does nothing but bubble slighly in the ziplock over those 10 days of waiting, it is living! And by parceling it up, and giving it to your friends, you are giving them the gift of life, and it will become more and more.

practically speaking, it is a lot more handy for me to dump the 10 cents of yeast in than to nurture the batter along, adding cups of sugar, flour and milk