Challah

A few weeks before Christmas, Ann asked me to make a savory bread pudding for Christmas Day brunch and some time after that, to make the bread pudding out of challah, the braided egg bread of Jewish origin. I haven't made challah in forever and ironically enough, it was the very first bread that I ever learned to make. I baked bread regularly in college and the majority of loaves were challah.

Yeah, I know that I'm weird. While other college students were eating instant ramen, I was baking bread. I had an offer to work in a bakery in San Francisco after college, but I had my eyes set on the high tech world, even in those days before the Internet.

The Finished Challah

After college, as I went from one high-tech startup to the next, I took a few years off from baking, until we had young children, when I would bake all our bread and make pizza dough weekly in the years leading up to the restaurant. My bread efforts during this period were focused on pains rustiques and bâtards, French style country breads, with minimal yeast and ultra-long ferments.

During the restaurant years, the customer demand for bread required buying bread from a commercial bakery; we were just too small a restaurant to bake the immense quantity of bread that we needed. But we still made in house all the small lot and specialty breads that we needed, including pita, focaccia, and so forth.

One great thing that the restaurant did for me was change my entire approach to baking. And it all started with eggs. Our eggs, at first chicken eggs and in the last five years duck eggs, came from small local farmers. The first eggs of the season, the pullet eggs, would be tiny. The Rhode Island red chicken eggs from later in the season would be very large, putting commercially graded jumbo eggs to shame. The Silver Appleyard duck eggs were ginormous (and coincidentally spoiled me for any other kind of eggs). Our pastry program took a dramatic leap forward when we switched exclusively to duck eggs.

Challah Dough After First Rise

Because we never had any "regular" or even predictably sized eggs, recipes that specified "4 eggs" or "12 egg yolks" were useless. This and the vast quantities of products that we needed to prepare drove us to more commercial recipes in which all ingredients are specified by weight, typically in grams. Consequently, as we developed and wrote standard recipes, they were all expressed in grams.

Although alien to most home cooks, it is a great and almost foolproof way to document a recipe. And so, I learned to bake by weight. Even today, over three years since I retired from the restaurant business, we have a commercial digital scale on our counter.

It was on this scale that I measured all my challah ingredients. I dusted off an old recipe from the restaurant and scaled it to a single loaf from a recipe giving ingredients for 8- and 16-loaf batches. Onto the scale I put the empty mixer bowl and zeroed the weight. Then one by one, I added the requisite weight of ingredients: all-purpose flour, eggs, water, agave nectar, canola oil, salt, and yeast.

Ropes Ready to Braid

Challah dough is a really sexy dough. The oil and eggs make the dough very silky and pliable and fun to work with. It's also made with all-purpose flour instead of a harder (higher protein) flour and so it doesn't develop super stretchy glutens, making it very easy to work with and giving the resulting baked loaf a very smooth and even crumb.

I am really picky about the flour that I use in baking. Having baked a lot in my life, I want a flour that is going to be rock solid consistent from batch to batch so that it behaves the same way each time that I use it. At the restaurant, we had various tried and true flours, one for each specific task. At home where I have no need for 50-pound sacks of commercial flour, I depend on King Arthur flours just like I have for all my adult life. I might buy cans of generic private-labeled store brand black beans, but I insist on King Arthur flours. I trust them to perform.

Braided Loaf Ready to Rise

Challah comes in many braids (and in other forms too). For example, I've done four-rope and six-rope braids. And while they look fantastic, they all taste the same! And so for this loaf, I did the standard three-rope braid that everyone knows how to do. Do looks really count when you're going to cube the bread for bread pudding?

Egg-Washed Loaf Ready to Bake

After braiding, the loaf gets a second rise and then a brushing with egg wash before baking in a moderate oven. I find that when baking challah that it tends to brown easily because of the egg wash and the sugar in the bread caramelizing. In fact, if you try to make a low sugar version, the challah comes out very weakly colored.

Because it browns easily, I bake it on a double sheet tray (you can see in the photo above that I have stacked two sheet trays) to help insulate the bottom. Also, the loaf tends to brown before it cooks all the way through. I keep an eye on it and when it is good and brown, I give it a tap to see if it sounds cooked (kind of hollow) all the way through. Invariably, it wants another 10-15 minutes beyond browning, so I tent it with aluminum foil for the final few minutes n the oven.