BBA Challenge Bread #6: Challah!

Before I go into my usual rambling description of the bread, let me first summarize: WOW!

This week’s BBA bread was Challah and my husband was so excited when he found out! I, on the other hand, was nervous. My previous attempts at making challah left a lot to be desired, especially in terms of texture. My crumb never seemed to have that sort of squishy-moist interior, and the outer texture was never as smooth as commercial challah. I tried several recipes and was never sure what exactly was wrong. Enter the BBA Challenge and everything I’ve already learned about making bread in these six weeks (wow has it really been that long!?), and I am proud to say that this challah was not only a huge success, it was also my absolute favorite challah EVER!

Unlike every other bread we’ve made so far, this one does not start with a sponge. You jump right into making the dough in this one, first combining all the dry ingredients, then all the wet ingredients:

Then adding the wet to the dry and mixing it all up:

Oh wait, back up a second! I meant to talk about the eggs!

The predominant flavor in challah is eggs (after all that brioche, it was almost weird to make a bread without butter!) and if you’ve ever taste-tested supermarket eggs vs. farm-fresh eggs, you know what a difference there is between the two. When I saw that I’d be making challah, I made a special trip to the nearest farmer’s market (which is still 10 blocks away!) just to buy a dozen eggs. I ended up finding all sorts of ways to eat those eggs in the next week, and they were so good in every preparation that now I’m seriously considering making the trek weekly so we can eat delicious eggs all the time. It seems like a lot of work to walk a mile to buy eggs, but I do enjoy going to the farmer’s market and it’s a good walk for Arnold — and for me, who am I kidding! All this bread is settling around my waist already . . .

ANYWAY, back to the challah. The book doesn’t say what the dough should look like after mixing it, just that you should mix until the ingredients “form a ball.” I didn’t have to add any water to get to this consistency, which I decided was good enough:

In hindsight, I probably should have mixed it a bit more because it did take quite a bit of extra kneading to get to the windowpane stage. The dough also kept eating all the counter flour, it felt like I added a whole bunch of extra flour during kneading. Other challenge participants have reported having to add a lot of extra flour to some of the other breads, but I never really had that experience until this one. I think it might have been the eggs that made the difference, I find that farmer’s market eggs have a runnier texture than supermarket eggs, so I think my dough was wetter than it would have been with supermarket eggs.

As I was saying, this dough took a long time to knead. This photo is what it looked like when it finally passed the windowpane test after about 15 minutes of kneading. I thought it looked a bit lumpy but since it passed the test I moved on and shaped it into a boule:

Have I mentioned before that shaping boules is one of my favorite steps in bread making? They’re just so cute!

Then I plopped it into a greased bowl to ferment:

It grew a TON!

After this initial ferment comes a punching-down step, which in the past I’ve always done gently with the idea that punching down too much can ruin the texture of the bread. In this recipe, however, the instructions say to knead the bread for two minutes in order to degas (the fancy word for punch down) and I have to admit this scared the crap out of me! I only kneaded for maybe 30 seconds because I was horrified by how much the dough collapsed and I was really scared of ruining yet another challah. Of course it turns out I should have trusted Mr. Reinhart! My crumb came out totally fine but there were bigger holes than you usually see in challah. So, any of you who’ve been conditioned to gently degas, don’t be afraid to do it not-so-gently to this bread!

Frankly, even after punching down more than I’ve ever done before, this bread grew the most of any bread I’ve ever made. This is what it looked after the second ferment:

It was not only huge, there were also giant bubbles in it! It was kind of freaky and I wondered if I’d done something wrong (yes, I do wonder that at least 10 times during every the making of each bread!). Then came another scary part, dividing the bread into three:

I was again scared of completely deflating the dough while dividing it, so I tried to do it gently but the dough still fell a whole bunch. I then shaped each piece into a boule and let them rest for 10 minutes, during which they poofed right back up again and freaked me out (again!) with the giant bubbles that formed:

After this step I decided to weigh each piece, and it’s a good thing I did because my eyeballing the division turned out to be not all all accurate and all 3 weighed different amounts. I ripped a piece off the biggest ball and added it to the smallest, and decided that was good enough.

Moving onto the braiding, first I rolled the pieces out into logs:

Which, by the way, is really hard to do without pressing down on the dough to roll it! Since I was terrified of deflating the dough, I decided to do the rolling out in stages. First I rolled them as far as they would go, then I waited about 5 minutes, rolled them out more, waited again, and rolled them again. This let the dough rest and relax enough that it could be stretched more without having to press down on it so much (I learned this technique for  shaping pizza dough, by the way).

Once the strands were long enough for my taste, I started braiding them using the technique in the book. This is actually different than how I’ve braided bread in the past, because it starts with the middle and works out to the end on one side, then on the other. In the past I’ve braided from end to end (like one would do for hair) so I was interested in trying this variation. First you lay the three strands like so:

Then you braid the side closest to you and squish the ends together to hold it:

Here’s an aerial view so you can get a better idea of how it looks at this stage:

Then you do the same to the other side to end up with a full braid:

Next time I’ll make the ends of each strand thinner, because my braid ended up being about the same width all the way down and usually challah is thicker in the middle and thinner at the ends. It didn’t matter at all for the taste, but it didn’t look as pretty as it could have! Actually, next time I’ll divide this recipe into two challot (yes, the plural of challah is challot, not challahs!) because this loaf was HUGE and it would have been nice to have two normal-sized loaves instead of one huge loaf.

Oh, and as for this method of braiding? I think I do like it better than just braiding from end to end, it gives you a better chance of making the braiding really even!

After proofing it had grown a crazy amount again:

I brushed it with egg white and popped it into the oven. For this bread my oven again decided to run hot and the internal temperature was 10 degrees over the target by the time I checked it. So I ended up only baking the bread for about 2/3rds of the time called for in the book, even though it was a huge loaf. It wasn’t as browned as I would have liked when it came out:

But I was super impressed with the oven spring (see how the middle of the braid isn’t browned?) and could hardly wait to bite into it! Look how awesome the crumb looks:

The loaf was so huge that it didn’t fit on the challah board until we’d gotten down to the half-way point, but I couldn’t make challah without photographing it on the challah board now could I?

In this shot you can see the hole made by the thermometer!

We got this board as a wedding gift from our rabbi and it’s really cool because it has a space to store the bread knife when you’re not using it . . . unfortunately you can’t see it in this shot because it’s behind the loaf of bread, so you have to take my word for it! Next time I make challah I’ll be sure to take a proper photo of the board.

And yes, there will certainly be a next time! This bread so thoroughly beat out all the previous breads that it’s kind of shocking. I’m not even a huge challah fan (Adam’s a whole different story, he could eat an entire loaf!) but this one was amazing. I particularly like that it wasn’t as sweet as some challah recipes are, that way it goes better with savory dishes. This bread toasted is hands-down the best sandwich bread EVER! I ate sandwiches for 3 days straight because I couldn’t get enough of the bread. And Adam made some french toast one morning and proclaimed it the best french toast ever!

All in all this week’s challenge was a huge, resounding success. I’m re-energized and excited to tackle the next bread, which is one of my favorites: Ciabatta! I probably won’t get to it until next weekend though, we’re going to the beach this weekend so I’m taking the week off from bread-baking. But don’t think that means there’ll be no new content here this week, I have lots of recipes waiting for blog posts . . .

Want to join us in the BBA Challenge? Get yourself a copy of Peter Reinhart’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice, the incredibly comprehensive how-to-book for bread, and play along! Full details on the challenge are here.

Tagged as: BBA Challenge, bread baking, challah