My Challah Recipe

 One of my readers, Viviene, asked for my challah recipe. 

I had started baking challot maybe twenty-five years ago with memories of my father's excellent challah in my memory and Mollie Katzen's Racheley's Challah recipe at hand. The Mollie Katzen recipe was a good starting point for me. Over the years my recipe has evolved enough so I can comfortably claim this as my own. I often will post photos of the challot I am making for that week's Food Friday post. The photos here were taken over several years.

Tools

dough/bench scraper

large bowl( I use metal because it is lightweight)

tea towel to cover the challah and dough

large baking pan

parchment paper

large mixing spoon

teaspoon, tablespoon and measuring cup 

Ingredients

3.5 cups water

1 tsp yeast

6 eggs(plus one for glazing the challot before baking)

spices(coriander, cardamom, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, cloves, ginger)

vanilla

1 cup oil( I use olive oil but a different mildly flavored oil will work fine)

1 TBS salt

Sarah Jacobs Challah

1. Measure 3.5 cups water into a large bowl.

   
   
   If it is cold in your kitchen, pre-heat the water in the microwave for a minute. (To be honest I rarely heat up my water these days)

2. Add 1 scant tsp yeast to the bowl by sprinkling the yeast over the surface of the water.

   
   
   Drizzle in about a tablespoon of honey into the bowl. This is to feed the yeast. You can also sprinkle in a tbs of flour at this point onto the surface of the water. 
   
   
   

3. This is when I add ground spices to my dough. The manna in the desert tasted like coriander, so I always add that.

   

   I usually grind up my spices in a coffee grinder

   
   I also add cinnamon, allspice,cloves, nutmeg, cardamom and vanilla. You can add other flavors if you like or eliminate the spices you don't have on hand or hate.. As for quantities, anything from a ¼ tsp to a tsp of the spices. Yes, they all need to be ground. Freshly grated orange peel is nice as well. After everything is added to the bowl, go do something else for five minutes or so. 

4. Come back to your bowl after ten or fifteen minutes. The yeast should have bloomed by now. ( you will see blobs of cloudy looking stuff dotting the top surface of the  contents of the bowl or a cloudy circle at the top of the bowl)

   
   
   

5. Now it is time to assemble your dough. Add 1 cup oil. I use olive oil, but any bland-tasting oil will do. Pour 1 cup honey into the cup you used to measure the oil. The honey will slide out of the measuring cup. Add the honey to the bowl. Break six eggs one at a time into that same cup and add them to the dough after inspecting them to ensure they have no blood spots. Add a tbsp of salt to the bowl. 

6. Now you can start adding flour, a cup at a time.  Use a high gluten flour if you can find it. It makes a big difference. You can use a big wooden or metal spoon to mix the dough at this point. Be sure to break up the eggs as you mix. After three or four cups of flour your bowl of dough will look like an ugly mess. A professional bread baker once told me that if you let the dough sit for 15 -30 minutes at this ugly mess stage, you will have an improved bread texture. That is true. But if you are pressed for time, keep adding flour until it is too difficult to mix with the spoon.

7. Once it has become too hard to mix the dough with a spoon, turn the dough onto a floured surface and add more flour as you knead. Keep kneading and adding flour until the dough is smooth. I can’t tell you how many cups of flour to add because the weather, how the flour was stored and lots of other intangibles will all factor into how much flour you will eventually add. This is a great upper body workout. This should take about 20 minutes. You are done with the kneading when the dough starts to feel smooth, kind of like  baby’s tushy.

   
   
   

8. Plop your kneaded smooth dough back into the bowl, cover it with a clean dish towel and let the dough rise for a couple of hours. If your kitchen is hot you can put the dough in a cooler spot in the house. If you need to, you can leave the dough bowl in the fridge overnight. You might want to also cover the dough with plastic wrap if it is doing a long hang out in the fridge.

9. Your dough should be doubled in size.

   
   
   Punch it down a bit and turn it out of the bowl onto your clean and floured counter. Knead for a few minutes and then if you do the mitzvah of taking challah this is the time to do it.
   
   
   

10. Cut the dough into two. 

11. Take one of the halves of dough and cut that into two. Take that now ¼ of the dough and shape into a challah. If you are me, you make a four stranded loaf. A four stranded loaf always looks prettier than a three stranded loaf. That task is easier if you start the braid in the middle of the loaf rather than the end. I do not know the reason for this but trust me.Tutorial for making a four stranded loaf Put your braided challah on a prepared baking pan ( either grease the pan or use parchment paper)

    
    
    

12.  As an optional refinement, rather than just forming your dough into snakes and then braiding them you can roll out the dough into a rectangle that you tightly roll into a snake. For a mysterious reason this further improves the texture of the dough. If you really want to gild the lily you can cover the rolled out rectangle with spices and cocoa or jam before rolling it up.a demo of rolled filled challot. Lately I have been rolling the challot out, adding a filling and then plaiting the outer edges

    
    
    

13. 
    
    
    
    

The final result is really fancy looking even though the effort is minimal

For the fillings look around and see what you have around

,jam, fruit spreads, apple butter, cocoa all of which can be jazzed up with some spices or good vanilla. The puddle of burned sugar you see above was caused by a leak of silan, date honey. Despite the leak, the challah was delicious

1. Make the other three challot. Cover the braided challot with a tea towel and let the challah rise for about two hours. If your kitchen is really hot, put the pan in the fridge for part of the rise or put your baking pan in front of the air conditioner.

   

   Yes, these are seven challot and not four

   
   

2. After the braided challot have risen, preheat your oven to 425 or as high a temp as your oven has. While the oven pre-heats beat an egg and paint the challot with the egg. If you want a hard crust add some flour to the egg wash.

3. After the oven reaches its temperature put the challah in the oven and then lower the heat to 385. Bake until the challot are chestnut brown and sound hollow when thunked.

   
   
   

4. When you heat your food up for Shabbat dinner, put the challot in the oven to warm with the rest of your food. Warm challah is always better than cold--and the texture of the crust improves with the re-heating. I warm my Shabbat dinner at 170.

This challah freezes well in a sealed plastic zipper bag. We always eat 2 one Shabbat and eat the frozen challot the next week. During Covid times and having fewer eaters around our table I have been making 6 challot out of the batch of dough.

Makes four large challot or as many smaller challot as you want to make