Doris and Jilly Cook » Bread

Pita Pita Pita

dorisandjilly — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:05:48 +0000

I used to bake a lot of bread back when I was in grad school, but then I stopped. Lately I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of it—not enough to join one of the ever-popular challenges, but enough to have it around. Homemade pita has to be one of my all-time favorites.

This particular batch is from the somewhat fussy directions in Rose Beranbaum’s The Bread Bible, but since her commentary suggests that any pizza dough will do, I’ll spare you the ingredients. The key in pita dough is in the kneading, the shaping, and the heating of the oven. So, more or less, here’s what you do.

1) The dough is fairly wet, so use a stand mixer if you have one. Just toss everything in the bowl and mix on medium low with a dough hook for a good 10 minutes. The dough should be fairly smooth.

2) Let it rise slowly to develop flavor. I stuck mine in the fridge and shaped it the next day.

3) When you’re ready to start shaping, split the dough into ping pong ball size pieces. Don’t roll them, though—you want to shape them by pulling and stretching without breaking the gluten. Set them on a flour-dusted surface, squish slightly, cover with a towel, and let rest 20 minutes.

4) Roll each ball into a disc about 1/4 to 1/3 inch thick (about 4 inches). Let them rest another 10 minutes, this time without a towel.

5) Meanwhile, get your oven nice and hot, preferably 500°F. If you have a baking stone, great; if not, just invert a roasting pan. The point is that you need a hot, smooth surface that you can put the pita on. Toss as many as will fit in the oven and bake three minutes. Give the oven a 5-minute break between each batch to let it warm back up.

And look at them! So puffy, with the cute little pocket inside! Tasty, too. Word on the street is that you can also cook them on a griddle or hot skillet, but I haven’t tried it. If you have, and it works, please tell us in the comments!

Strata with Sausage and Broccoli

dorisandjilly — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:55:06 +0000

Perhaps it has not escaped your notice that I seem to have a lot of eggs and cheese. It’s inevitable. I’m often on the road this time of year, but the CSA, with its dozen eggs, half pound of cheese, and two pounds of meat, arrives every week. My husband and I therefore eat a lot of yellow dinners. This is an attempt to get some color back into our diets.

I discovered the joys of strata through Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. They are a wonder of the kitchen: utterly flexible, and fairly forgiving. Better yet, a good strata uses stale bread! So long as you’re using some combination of eggs, milk, bread, and vegetables that go together, you’ll end up with something nice. Do tell us what you come up with, yes?

Strata with Sausage and Broccoli

half a loaf of stale bread (good bread makes a better strata)
4 eggs
2 c. milk (2% is fine; richer milk makes a richer strata)
1 lb. loose breakfast sausage
1 head broccoli, cut into large pieces
About 1/4 lb. cheddar, Swiss, or other mild cheese, shredded
Salt and pepper, to taste

1) Brown the sausage.

2) Blanche the broccoil (cook in boiling water only until it changes colors).

3) Cut the bread into enough thin slices to make three layers in a deep baking vessel (I use a 9x9x3 pan). Put the first layer on the bottom. Cover with 1/2 of the sausage, 1/2 of the broccoli, and 1/3 of the cheese. Add another layer of bread, then the other half of the sausage and broccoli and another third of the cheese. Add the third layer of bread, and top with the remaining cheese.

4) Beat the eggs, milk, salt, and pepper. Pour the mixture over the bread. Use a potato masher to push the bread beneath the level of the custard. Cover and refrigerate for at least an hour, then bake at 350ºF for about an hour, or until it’s golden and puffy.

Hobo Bread: Theme and Variation

dorisgoat — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:54:45 +0000

Some of you may recall Jilly’s gorgeous—and somewhat curious—hobo bread. In Jilly’s low-impact approach to daily baking, not only do you not knead the dough, you don’t wash the bowl. I’d been meaning to try it for quite some time, but I must admit that I was a little bit intimidated by the process…all those weights and measures and stuff. Last week I finally dived in. Since I didn’t have a starter, I used about 1 teaspoon of yeast to get things started, mixed it with 3 cups of flour and 1/2 cups water, a handfull of oatmeal and flax seeds, and let it sit all night. The next morning I stirred it down, tossed it around a couple of times on a flour-covered surface, put it in a colander lined with a muslin bag, let it rise, and baked it in a preheated dutch oven. (And very important: I saved a blob for the next time and stuck it in the unwashed bowl.) It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t spectacular.

Day 2: No added yeast: This time, I used the previous day’s blob as my starter. And lo! Beautiful bread:

And then, the next day, I took the starter and made tasty little sourdough hamburger buns:

The moral of the story is that you, too, can have amazing, pseudo-sourdough breads with very little effort, so long as you can stand the sight of an unwashed bowl and dough blob in your kitchen. By request, I’ve provided simplified instructions.

Jilly’s Hobo Bread, Simplified

1) When you make a batch of bread, pull off about 1/4 c of dough and throw it in your bowl. Add about 1/2 c of water and whatever flour is left on your counter to the bowl. Cover and let it sit overnight, or a day or two.

The night before or morning that you want bread:
2) Add about 2 1/2 c flour and 1 c of water to the bowl. Stir everything together and cover. Let it sit overnight or at least five hours. It should be quite large and bubbly.

3) Prepare a surface to work on by coating it with flour. Pour your dough onto the surface. If you’re planning on adding goodies, like herbs or nuts or seeds or cheese into the dough, remember to pull off the hunk of spare dough first. Work enough flour into it that you can handle the dough, then let it rest for about 15 minutes.

4) Shape the dough however you want. It’s not a terribly sturdy dough, so it will do better if it has support, like some sort of bowl or pan lined with a flour-lined shirt. It does have some spring, though, so you can definitely make rolls if you want. Let it rise about 2 hours.

5) A half hour before you’re ready to bake, preheat the oven to 475°, preferably with a cooking vessel, like a dutch oven or clay pot, inside. Then gently transfer the dough to the vessel and bake it until it’s done: generally about half an hour. Note that I baked the rolls dirctly on a cooking sheet, and they turned out just fine.

Lamb burger love

jilllygoat — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 02:41:36 +0000

I live in a rural area where the code amongst neighbors is strong and firm: you do not ever show up empty handed, ever. We’re blessed with the sort of neighbors whose hands are frequently full of delicious lamb, locally raised and generously shared. We took advantage of our wealth one night and dined on lamb burgers, packed with wine-soaked currants, a hefty amount of garlic, and served it on our homemade hobo bread with smoked paprika mayo, fresh spinach and grilled onions. We ate, and were happy. Here are the details.

**Perhaps I should mention that we helped prepare this particular morsel with our former employers a few weeks ago. I tweaked a little to my liking, but felt I should give the proper nod to Ciao Thyme Catering in Bellingham, Washington.

You’ll need some amount of ground lamb.

A good handful of currants.

Several, or fewer, cloves of garlic, slivered or minced.

Salt and pepper

A good slug of some sort of red wine.

In a small saucepan, bring the wine to a simmer and add the currants. You’ll want the wine to reduce until the currants have absorbed most of the liquid. Add the garlic and cook for a minute more, just to take the edge off. Remove from heat and let cool before you add it to the lamb. Don’t forget your salt and pepper!

Sear in a skillet (if your lamb is anything likes ours you won’t need any additional fat in the pan) or over a medium hot grill. We tossed some sliced onions onto our griddle and let them brown nicely while the lamb cooked.

As for the smoked paprika mayo: If you don’t have a little tin of smoked paprika in your life you need one. Not just some forgotten garnish for deviled eggs, smoked paprika is a little like powdered bacon. Smoky, spicy and warm, it is soo delicious stirred into mayo, homemade or otherwise. It does wonders for beans and grains, especially if perhaps you love bacon and smoked pork products but understand that your regular consumption of these morsels may not be in your best interest.

One of my favorite ways to incorporate smoked paprika into our lives is sprinkled onto roasted or fried sweet potatoes. Yes, yes!!

Other lamb burger ideas: Drizzle with homemade tzatziki…lemon aioli and arugula…slivered fennel and roasted peppers….other ideas?

Yeastapalooza, Part 2

dorisgoat — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:38:11 +0000

Yeastapalooza did not merely consist of cinnamon rolls and chocolate babka, my friends! We made blini, too!

Now, I must confess that I was not wise in the way of blini (the plural of blintz) before this weekend’s little experiment. Sure, I had had them, stuffed with cherry jam, at Rein’s Deli, but I didn’t know what made them special. Blini, it turns out, are like little pancakes with yeast in them. Or they’re like little souffles with flour and yeast in them. Or crepes. You get the idea. Their character is totally defined by your choice of topping. This vaguely southwestern recipe included cornmeal, so we topped them with sour cream and scallions, but my billy goat ate some of the leftovers with maple syrup to equally pleasing effects. And even better yet, this recipe used several eggs.

Corn Blini

Now, I must confess that I have misplaced the piece of paper on which I scrawled the recipe, so I’m working from memory. That also means that I can’t provide a citation to the original source. I’m hoping my co-conspirator can help me out in the comments.

3/8 c. milk
2 t. instant yeast
2 T butter, plus more for frying
1/4 c. cornmeal
1/4 c. all-purpose flour
1 egg yolk
2 egg white (use the extra yolks for mayo)
salt? pepper? It seems like there was something else…

1) If you haven’t already done so, separate your eggs. Beat the whites until the yolks form stiff peaks.

Remember, the key to happy egg whites is to make sure that none of the yolk make it into the whites. Some white in the yolk is, however, OK.

2) Warm the milk up a bit, but not too much, so as not to kill the yeast. I don’t use a thermometer, but if you do, I believe the happy spot is around 105°F. Dissolve the yeast in the milk and set aside for a few minutes. Add the flour and cornmeal.

3) Cream the butter and the yolk in the mixer. Add the yeast mixture and mix thoroughly.

4) Fold in the whites. Now, this is slightly tricky. When you fold something, you gently lift it and distribute with a spatula. This is not nearly so aggressive as stirring. When you’re done, it should look something like this:

Notice how much it looks like a souffle?

Then you just plop little bits—about 1/3 a cup at a time—onto a buttered griddle or pan. As the co-conspirator and I belatedly learned, the bigger your griddle, the faster this will go.

Then you eat them. You could theoretically keep them warm in a low oven while you cooked the rest, but we found it necessary to eat them one by one as they came off the stove. We tripled the recipe to no ill effects.

Yeastapalooza, Part I

dorisgoat — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:11:07 +0000

A co-conspirator and I dedicated a good chunk of last weekend to a science experiment involving different kinds of bread dough. The goal—besides blini for dinner and two freezers full of chocolate babka and cinnamon rolls—was to check out what different moisture content, varieties of fat, and egg treatments would do to dough. All of these doughs involved eggs and butter, but the cinnamon rolls also had sour cream. The blini isn’t really a “bread” at all, but since it contains eggs, flour, and yeast, we thought we’d give it a try. We had originally planned to include Jilly’s amazing hobo bread in the mix but then reason got the better of us.

This post has the potential to be very long, I’m just going to link to the recipes to the chocolate babka and the cinnamon rolls. Let’s focus on the big picture:

chocolate babka = wet dough, with 2 eggs, 1 extra egg yolk, a lot of milk, and 10 T butter

cinnamon rolls = sturdy dough, with 4 eggs, less milk/water compared to the flour, and 1/2 c sour cream

blini = really wet, more of a batter, really, with separate eggs and whites, milk, and just a smidgeon of flour and corn meal

The blini were delicious, but for the purpose of the experiment let’s focus on the real yeast breads. I promise I’ll post more info on the blini tomorrow.

The Doughs

The co-conspirator and I mixed everything in a KitchenAid stand mixer—no hand kneading for us.

Both mixed beautifully. The babka dough (above) stayed fairly wet, but, honestly, the doughs didn’t look that different when we set them out to rise.

The top two bowls have the babka dough; the bottom two have the cinnamon rolls dough. You can sort of see that the cinnamon roll dough keeps its shape better, but the real difference was in the leavening. The cinnamon roll dough rose a lot faster, both because it had so many eggs, and because the sour cream resulted in a lighter dough. In other words, the two eggs and the yeast in the babka dough had to work very hard to lift up all that butter and the extra yolk. It was sort of cold, so it took a good two to three hours for them to double…

…after which we punched it down. Now you’re looking at the cinnamon roll dough. See how nice and firm it is? This is important, because in both doughs, you have to roll them out. Compare:

Notice how the cinnamon roll dough keeps its shape? It’s easy to work with, and a cinch to roll up. With the babka dough, on the other hand, it’s like you’re working with sand. Very sticky, gooey, sand. I probably put too much flour on the counter because I didn’t have the patience for it. We put sugar and soaked currants on the cinnamon rolls and rolled them up like croissants. With the babka, you brush the dough with butter, coat the edge with an egg wash, and cover the whole thing like chocolate.

The babka instructions are a hair confusing, so I remembered to take pictures for those of you who, like me, lack imagination:

First, we divided each recipe’s worth of dough in half (we were making a double batch, so for us, that made 4 parts). After you roll out the dough and sprinkle it with chocolate, you roll it up, then join it into a loop, then twist it into a figure 8. Then, you put two coils into a bread pan lined with parchment paper. Got it? As you can see,the dough is thin and fragile, and the chocolate sometimes broke through. That’s OK.

The cinnamon rolls are more straightforward. Just roll them up and set them on a baking sheet:

Again, note the firm texture. No cracking, and because the dough was so firm to begin with, no temptation to add extra flour.

The Breads

So, was it worth it?

Let’s start with the rolls. They looked great, as you can see. But the taste? Disappointing. I found the dough heavy and the rolls hard within half an hour of coming out of the oven. I thought I had simply overcooked them, but my co-conspirator confirmed: there’s something not quite right about this recipe. We think it’s a couple of things. The ratio of flour to liquid is almost certainly too high, but we’re also suspicious of sprinkling the cinnamon/sugar mixture directly on the dough without brushing it with butter. Without the butter, the sugar sinks into the dough, and everything just gets hard, rather than delicious. My co-conspirator thought it also needed a lot more cinnamon, but I was pretty happy with the spiciness. Frosting would probably help.

But the babka! Granted, it’s hard to go wrong with that much butter and chocolate, but I couldn’t believe how light and flaky this was. Major deliciousness. Let’s go to the close-up:

Can you see the lovely crumb on this guy? It just melts in your mouth. It’s now been three days since I baked mine, and it’s still moist and wonderful. My co-conspirator managed to get even more flavor out of hers by finishing with a slow final rise overnight, but I was impatient and baked my babka Saturday afternoon. I have no regrets.

What’d We Learn?

Butter is a miracle product.

Wet doughs are worth the effort.

Sugar without butter is not so great.

Adventures in Hobo Bread

jilllygoat — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:00:03 +0000

So truly, you want tasty and fast bread that looks all artisan-y and spendy. Me too. I like expensive bread. I especially like it now that I love hundreds of miles away from being able to purchase this bread. Having moved to the land of 79 cent white bread two years ago, we always knew that good bread was just something we were going to have to sacrifice here in Southern Indiana. Which of course means we would find a way to do it ourselves.

There has been an awful lot of food talk about Mark Bittman’s No-Knead bread. Some offer huzzahs, citing the ease of preparation, flavor, and looks. Others decry the lack of sourness, crispness and fussiness that this type of bread demands. (Rose Levy Beranbaum, ahem…)

Look, I like bread. I pounced on all the no-knead variations. The one I have played with the most is the Mother Earth News version, which squawks a little loudly about how great it is. I found it to be super-duper hydrated (which is the point, I know) but I kept producing blobs. I wanted tight boules all over my counter, not blobs! My other huge motivating factor in perfecting this recipe is that it allows you to chuck things in a bowl, stir, and walk away. Very, very important. I also wanted to be able to produce this recipe without using plastic wrap or washing an unreasonable amount of dishes. Say, like one spoon.

The Basics:

Get yourself a fine bread bowl that you won’t mind wholly sacrificing to the bread gods. Ceramic is preferable, but glass will do. I wouldn’t use stainless or aluminum.

You’ll also want those cheap plastic or wooden woven baskets that bread or chips are served in at restaurants. Round is best but you can wing it with oval.

Be prepared to sacrifice a few towels/cloth thingees that you’ll be coating with flour. I use these muslin sacks my mom has in bulk quantity (don’t ask), but you could use any flat weave material. The average dishcloth is probably not a good idea; t-shirt type material, muslin, or floursacks are the best here. Avoid terry cloth.

Critical also is the dutch oven. I use a cast iron one, but I have also baked this bread in a squat stock pot with a lid. Whatever you choose to bake in, I would recommend lining the sides and bottom with one big piece of aluminum foil. Parchment paper sticks, and you can’t reuse it.

This sounds sooo much more fussy than it really is. Once you’re set-up, it’s very easy, I promise.

Origin Stories

Here’s the original recipe, just for background. My modified (and I think, far more successful, recipe follows this one.)

1/4 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 1/2 cups warm water
3 cups all-purpose (AP) flour, plus more for dusting…you may use any combination of white or whole wheat.
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

In your sacred bread bowl, dump the water, add the yeast. Add flour and salt. Stir this globbly mess until you feel like all the water has touched some flour and vice versa. Cover and let the dough rest at least 8 hours and up to 24.

When the surface of the dough is dotted with bubbles and yeasty smelling, dust your work surface with a generous layer of flour. Pour (yes, pour) the dough onto the work surface, dust with more flour, cover with your bowl (or plastic wrap) and wander away for about 15 minutes.

(Here’s where I continually ran into trouble. The recipe states that I should be able to lightly shape this goo into a ball and let it rise for 2 hours. It has always been far too wet.)

Take your t-shirt, towel or what have you and coat it with flour. I don’t mean dust it, either. I mean COAT THE SUCKER. I grind into the material as thickly as I can. I occasionally shake out the excess and add another layer when I feel like it needs to be freshened. Lay your flour coated material in your restaurant basket (or round colander or sieve or whatever else you have) and set it aside while you try to shape this liquid goo into a ball. Transfer the amorphous shape with the bottom up to your basket, cover gently, and let rise for about 2 hours or so. When it’s ready, it will perhaps be nearly doubled in size and not spring back readily when you poke it.

Next, preheat your oven to 475 degrees WITH YOUR BAKING VESSEL INSIDE IT. This can be a glass, ceramic or cast iron dutch oven thingee, about 6 to 8 quarts.Make sure it’s good and hot. I line it with aluminum foil because I’m too lazy and make too much bread to wash the sucker out every time. When the dough is ready, remove your baking vessel from the oven and remove the lid. Lift your risen bread by both ends of the towel and kind of roll it into the !!hot!! vessel. (WATCH YOUR WRISTS.) Take your sharpest knife and cut deeply across the surface. Replace the lid and tuck the whole thing back into the oven.

Bake it for about 20 minutes with the lid on. Generally, when I smell the bread, I check it and remove the lid to let the top get nice and brown. When I smell the bread again, I take it out and promptly move it to a cooling rack.

My Version:

I stopped measuring, for one thing. But that doesn’t help you, now, does it? So I weighed out a couple of batches for you, my friends, so you can follow along.

I also decided to treat my bread like sour dough. Every time you make a loaf of bread, remove a blob of dough–say, about the size of a deck of cards. Set it aside for your next loaf. You can wrap it up and refrigerate it, or just cover with water in your sacred bread bowl, which is what I do. My bowl always has either this lump of dough in it or the next batch rising. Got it? The combined weight of my dough blob and water consistently weighed in at 13 oz total. Just pull off your blob, put it in the bowl and add enough water to make it roughly 13 oz. You can go less or more, assuming your vessel can hold a larger loaf. I double this all the time by eyeballing the water and dough blob.

I also stopped washing my bread bowl. That may gross some of you out. However, it’s the same idea of feeding a sourdough starter, just lazier. I scrape down the sides very thoroughly into the dough blob and water mixture each time.

Next, I sprinkle in the yeast, about .20 ounces. This is a fairly consistent amount. I also drizzle in about .85 ounces of honey; sometimes more, others less. None at all if I don’t have any. Sugar is ok…but the honey is nicer.

I start stirring at this point, breaking up the dough blob with the spatula. I start adding the fun stuff, like oats, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, cooked quinoa, and ground flax. Nuts, and dried fruits are delicious as well. The total weight of the fun stuff has generally been :3 to 3.5 ounces. Splash this around with the water.

Next, I add whole wheat flour (yup, I ground it myself). About 3 ounces. For first timers, I might scale back here since too much whole wheat flour can make for a denser loaf.

Now you can start adding your AP flour (6 ounces). Don’t forget the salt–usually .5o ounces. I add the AP flour and salt last so the salt doesn’t frazzle the yeast and kill it off. Stir until it’s sticky, and pulling away from the sides of the bowl. If you stick your finger in there, it’s going to come off with dough. The dough should have a vague shape but not be a blobbly wet thing. Feel free to add flour until it looks like the picture.Don’t feel like you have to stop at 6 ounces if you need more.

You’ll note that there is a basic proportion to the ingredients here. Generally twice as much salt as yeast; half as much whole wheat flour and “fun stuff” as AP flour, and twice as much water as AP flour. Eyeballing all of this allows you to not wash any dishes except the the spatula!

Tuck your dough away. I make the dough at night and finish the bread at my leisure the next day. You may refrigerate the dough at this point if you’d like. Maybe up to a day or two.

When you’re ready to finish the dough, you’ll have your basket already lined with your flour coated material. I get all this ready before I handle the dough so I don’t have to flop around the kitchen with dough hands.

I dump a fair amount of flour on the work surface. At least half a cup or so. Scrape the dough (if you have to pour your dough, get ready to add ALOT of flour) onto the counter. I give my bread a quick knead, adding flour as necessary so it doesn’t stick to me or the counter. I always have to add some. Next, cover it and walk away for a few minutes–say, 15. I’ve forgotten about it for up to an hour with nothing bad happening.

Next, smoosh your dough into a rough square (or a rectangle if you’re partial to those instead). Add flour as needed to keep things from sticking. Roll up the dough onto itself, then turn it 90 degrees and roll it again. I do this a few times, turning and rolling until the dough starts to feel tense and tight, as compared to loose and fluffy when it was laying on the counter. When it starts to tighten up, start shaping it into a ball shape by smoothing the outer surface of the dough and tucking it under itself. This motion is nearly impossible to describe with words! Your goal is to create surface tension on the outer layer of the dough so it’ s nice and tight. I turn the dough ball in a circle while I do this, adding flour as needed.

Now, turn your dough ball over and place it upside down in your flour cozy. Fold the sides of the material over neatly, and let it rise for about 2 hours. Again, I’ve walked away for nearly 8 hours (my house is frigid this time of year!) and had good results.

Preheat your oven with your baking vessel inside, lined with foil and with the lid in place. If you use cast iron, let it heat up for a while, like 20 minutes or so. Remove the hot vessel form the oven, take off the lid, and kind of lift the material with the dough from the basket. If you have used enough flour on your material, the dough should just roll right off the surface of the material (rolling over so that the ugly bottom you were looking at is now the touching the bottom of the hot pan) and into the hot vessel. (Again, MIND YOUR WRISTS.) Take your sharpest knife and assertively cut across the top of the dough. Replace the lid, put it back in the oven, and check it when you can smell the bread. Maybe 15 to 20 minutes or so. At this point I remove the lid and let it finish baking until it’s nice and brown and crackly. Transfer the bread promptly to a cooling rack.

Other Stuff You Might Want To Know:

One thing that always bugged me about bread baking is all that flour left over on the counter. I scrape it up and add it to my dough blob along with the water for my next round of bread. Granted, it’s not a lot of flour, but if you bake bread everyday it starts to bug you.

I keep my bread bowl covered with a plate in order to eliminate the need for plastic wrap while rising or percolating.

Dried cranberries and pecans are a nice addition, as is fresh rosemary or other herbs.

Ok, so you forgot about your dough rising on the counter and it’s been a day or two. Not all is lost. The dough will be deflated and probably still have bubbles on the outer surface. I would sprinkle more yeast on the dough, stir it up, let it rest for a little while, and then proceed. I might add this yeast boost if I had left the dough for a few days in the fridge.

Challah: The un-brown

dorisandjilly — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:33:37 +0000

Yesterday I made two challah (what is the plural of challah?). They tasted delicious and used 6 (!!) eggs, but they’re just not quite as brown and shiny as I had hoped. I completed doused them in an egg wash and feared that if I added any more they might start to look like, you know, scrambled eggs or something when they baked. What’s the secret?

Next time I do this I’ll document and explain the braiding, which is actually pretty easy. Still getting a hang of this picture-taking thing. The recipe is more or less from Rose Berenbaum’s The Bread Bible. And yes, I am embarressed to say that I use her mesauring system, when you use a scale to measure the dry ingredients. Jilly assures me that you do not actually have to do this.

Challah

Starter:
5 oz or 1 c. flour
1 t. yeast
2/3 c. water
2 T honey (I use less)
3 eggs

Remaining dough:
23 oz or 4 2/3 c. flour
1 1/4 t. yeast
1 T salt
2 eggs
1/3 c. canola oil
a smidgen more honey

What to do:

1. Combine the starter ingredients in a bowl and set aside. Combine the remaining flour and yeast in another bowl. Pour the big bowl of dry flour on top of the little bowl of wet dough. Don’t mix it. Set it aside for about an hour.

2. Add the remaining two eggs, salt, oil, and honey to the bowl. If you’re kneading by hand, mix it with a spoon, then knead. If you’re using a stand mixer, just crank it up and beat for about 7 minutes until it’s smooth and shiny. Transfer to it an oiled bowl, cover, and let rise about 2 hours, until it’s doubled.

3. (Optional) Punch it down and let it double again.

4. Shape it. You can make one giant loaf, with either three or four strands in the braid, or you can make two small loafs, like I did. Basically, you roll out three long snakes (about 12 inches long each) and start braiding them from the middle. Seal the ends. Make an egg wash from 1 egg, combined with 1 T water, and thoroughly paint the dough. Then cover and let raise another hour.

5. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 350. When they’re done raising, cover them with yet more egg wash (apparently, use more than looks possible). Bake for about 40-50 minutes. Check halfway through to make sure they’re not getting too brown (hah!). If they are, cover them loosely with foil.

This is fairly dry bread, so if you don’t plan to eat it right away, freeze it. We like to cut it up first so it’s ready for sandwiches.