Thursday, May 14, 2009

Amish Friendship Bread

Our friends Jon and Holly gave us a starter for Amish Friendship Bread.  If you haven't had it before its a quite tasty "dessert" bread full of sugary goodness.  The starter grows in 10 day cycles.  At the end of the cycle the starter is big enough to seperate into 4 batches.  Each batch can be used to make 2 loaves of bread or start anew as a starter.  You can quickly see that if maintained, the initial starter will grow geometrically and produce ridiculous amounts of batches.  

How much growth?  Let us consider the a world in which I maintain the starters and hold off on making bread until Christmas.  There are > 220 days from now until Christmas.  That means the starter can go through 22 iterations.  After 22 cycles I will have 4^22 batches, approximately 17.6 trillion batches.  Forget Santa, an amish bread loaf for everyone on Christmas day.  This begs the question how much other ingredients do I need to bake (2*4^22) about 35.2 loaves of bread.  

Let's first examine the recipe.  To maintain the starter, you need to add ingredients on day 6 and day10.

For each Batch
Day 6
1 cup each of flour, milk, and sugar 
Day 10
1.5 cups each of milk, and sugar (no flour)

Every batch can produce 2 loaves of bread, the recipe for the bread is the following:
3 eggs
1 cup of Oil
1/2 cup of milk
1 cup of sugar
2 cups of flour
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp of baking soda
1/2 tsp of salt
1 Large box of instant vanilla pudding

Now I can calculate the approximate total amounts of ingredients for (2*4^22) 35.2 loaves of Amish friendship bread.  I converted teaspoons to cups (48 tsp in 1 cup).  Instead of performing all the calculations by hand a wrote a quick script in Python to figure this out for me.
Ingredients (approx.)
52.8 trillion eggs
17.6 trillion cups of oil
23.5 trillion cups of milk
32.3 trillion cups of sugar
41.0 trillion cups of flour
0.7 trillion cups of cinnamon
0.5 trillion cups of baking powder
0.2 trillion cups of vanilla
0.2 trillion cups of baking soda
0.2 trillion cups of salt
17.6 trillion large boxes of instant vanilla pudding

1 batch of bread (2 loaves) takes 1 hour in 350 degree oven.  Assuming I can find enough volunteers, ovens, and time, how much coal does TVA have to burn for me to bake 35.2 trillion loaves of bread.....