We recently made Amish Friendship Bread Pancakes and they were absolutely divine. They were light, fluffy and slightly sweet. Quite possibly the prettiest pancakes I have ever made too. Check out my Instagram stories for behind the scenes.
So, you may be asking yourself, what the heck are Amish Friendship Bread Pancakes?? I know, I did!
What the heck is Amish Friendship Bread?
Ok, according to Wikipedia– 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. The starter is a substitute for baking yeast and can be used to make many kinds of yeast-based breads, 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 has characteristics of both pound cake and coffee cake.
Unlike sourdough, this sourdough is “fed” lots of sugar, milk and flour over the course of 10 days. In short, the results are sweet delicious cinnamon bread and lots of starter to spare. The “friendship” part of the name comes from sharing your leftover starter with friends! Which we did but we had a very happy starter and lots of it.
How to make Amish Friendship Bread
Ok, but first, I found a great website for all things Amish Friendship Bread. Here, you can see how to start your own starter, super easy. This is such a great thing to do with kids. Its like a little science experiment. The boys would wake up and run to the kitchen to see how much our starter had grown, then they’d alternate who got to deflate it. The starter develops gases during the fermentation process and inflates (grows). It’s very cool to stir it and watch (feel) it deflate. The original recipe recommends putting the starter in a zip lock bag for the 10 day process. Which we did the first time around but after that I just used a mason jar or mixing bowl. I found that our starter was much happier in the latter.
Once you complete the 10 day cycle you can start making delicious Amish Friendship Bread and sharing leftover starter with friends and family. We ran out of friends and family to share our starter with! We just had SO much! I decided to use the leftover or discard to make some of the other recipes on the website I found. One of those recipes was the worlds best pancakes.
10 Day Processs
It is a little bit of a project but a fun and tasty one. I found I didn’t always have enough sugar or milk. Since it’s not something we eat a lot of and it uses quite a bit. Here’s a rundown of the 10 day cycle, after you have made your starter:
Day 1: Do nothing.
Day 2: Mash the bag.
Day 3: Mash the bag.
Day 4: Mash the bag.
Day 5: Mash the bag.
Day 6: Add to the bag: 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk. Mash the bag.
Day 7: Mash the bag.
Day 8: Mash the bag.
Day 9: Mash the bag.
Day 10: Baking Day
There you have it, I hope you give this a try. Like I said it’s a very fun and unique activity to do with children. Maybe something to do over spring break or summer. We will do it again over the winter break and gift starter for Christmas. I do wish I could coordinate with family and friends to have one family watch and feed the starter then divide the starter up with the group after the 10 days. Then another family would take over for the next 10 day cycle and repeat. Any takers??
Before I let you go, I do have another recipe for delicious and unique pancakes here. In this post, I share the recipe for our Birthday Pancakes! So delicious and part of our birthday traditions. In this post I share out Pumpkin Pancakes recipe. Another winner!
