Food Friday- Too Much Yeast Edition

A week does not go by when someone doesn't post a challah recipe on Facebook that they claim is the best ever recipe.  Every time I read through those recipes and I see that they are all made with far too much yeast. Yeast does make bread rise, but too much yeast makes bread taste nasty.

This week I saw a recipe that called for four tea-spoons of yeast, for one challah. That's  kind of crazy. I bake challah every other week. Each time I bake four big challot. Each one is  bigger than a standard bakery challah, probably 150% larger than a store challah. I use a scant tea-spoon of yeast to make the entire batch of four challot.

An overly yeasted bread tastes a little rotted. It will have a bad texture. Please don't use too much yeast. A bread tastes much better with a long slow rise.

So now that you have patiently sat through this lecture on yeast, onto some fun stuff.

This week I decided to go a little wild with my challot. I decided to roll cocoa and spices into each strand. I rolled all of the dough for one challah into a rectangle.

I then sprinkled it with cocoa,

Cinnamon, allspice cardamon and a bit of sugar 

and spread the mixture evenly with the back of a spoon. I rolled the dough up tightly

and then cut it in two.

Each roll then got rolled longer and thinner, like rolling clay snakes in kindergarten.

I had read somewhere, and I wish I could cite the source, that traditional Jewish bakeries braid four stranded challot by folding two long strands in half.

I decided to give it a try.

Here are my two strands folded in half around one another, and then part way through the plait.

The result is actually really fast. When you get to the bottom of the braid you just tuck the loose ends underneath. i think it looks really good.

Here are my challot, post rising and with their egg wash ready to be baked. You can see that some of the cocoa leaked out of one of the rolls.

And now here they are post baking, well risen and not overly yeasted.

And now for something completely different. I decant dish washing soap from the giant bottles from Costco into something smaller that lives on the sink.

I just changed brands of dish soap. I could look at this all day long.

Shabbat Shalom!