Update: Friendship Bread

So I did a little more searching and decided to try the following Friendship Bread starter recipe:

1 c. flour
1 c. sugar
1 c. milk

Mix together with a wooden spoon, then place 1 cup in each of three containers and give to three friends with the following instructions...(I won't bore you with the instructions, but if you want them, let me know).

I don't have three friends geographically close enough to give the starter to, and I wanted to keep some for myself anyway, so I just made 1/3 of the recipe.

This recipe, of course, begs the question: what is in there making it rise? In the other recipe that I posted, it's the yeast, but here, it's something that's already in there, I suspect in the milk. I may have to do a little more research to see what particular microscopic beast is making that bread so yummy (oh, right, it's the sugar! I mean what little microscopic beast's byproduct is leavening the bread). I'm interested to see if this will work. I tried making sourdough starter years ago, but it never worked.

Hmmm. I just remembered my brother talking about wild yeasts contaminating beer--apparently, they're just floating around out there waiting for some wet sugar to consume so they can multiply and take over the world. Maybe that's it, although one cannot really count on the wild yeast finding this particular batch of wet sugar, so the recipe would be terribly inconsistent.

Not to worry--I'll keep you posted on my discoveries.

Speaking of my brother, he's going to be 40 years old this year! Yikes. That means I can't be too far behind (about 3 1/2 years behind, actually).