The Loaf stops here?

A few days ago, a friend of Damian’s gave us an Amish Friendship Bread starter. I of course asked immediately about dairy content, and she said she didn’t realize but yes it had dairy in it. I really wanted to do this with Damian though, so at midnight I was knee deep in Google links searching for the Amish Friendship Bread starter recipe. I found it, printed it, and noted what substitutes I would need to make this. Then I got to thinking and here is where the trouble began.

I wanted to make something Damian could share with his friends. Then I thought it would be nice if he could share it with his food allergic friends. The trouble with this is all his friends have different allergies. So I would have to make it a dairy, egg, corn, gluten, peanut, tree nut and soy free Amish Friendship bread Starter. HA! I have a hard time cooking dairy free! Not to mention how much it would cost to make a bread like this.

Anyway, the thought that something as simple as a loaf of bread was separating us depressed me. When I shared my thoughts with my husband he just shook his head. He pointed out that it looked like this bread was never going to be made. I was perturbed with this attitude and instantly wanted to know why he would think such a thing.

He replied “You set out to make Amish Friendship Bread and somehow ended up trying to make super bread! Stick with what you know!” I knew immediately that he was right and he was right about the bread not being made too. It has been a week now and I still have not made this phantom bread. In my defense, I did forget to get dry yeast so I can’t make it until I get some.

Anyway, I did learn something from this experience. I was disappointed because I felt like we food allergy sufferers were “seperated by a simple loaf of bread”, but that isn’t entirely true. While we may not be able to safely pass an Amish Friendship Bread recipe to each other, it seems that is exactly what binds us as a community. We share many thing, but food isn’t usually one of them, and we all accept this as a condition to our condition (no pun intended).

So this weekend I am determined to make this bread. It will only be dairy free, and I will post the recipe here as dairy free, but I won’t feel guilty doing it.

I know that my son will someday, hopefully, appreciate the extra effort it took to make a special version of Amish Friendship Bread just so he could enjoy it with his non-allergic friends. I guess I could at least make it gluten free too. I have heard that Fleishmanns makes a gluten free yeast. But then I would need flour too and……Here I go thinking again…..