Hanukkah perfection
How to make an evenly brown, shiny-crusted challah loaf.
Beautifully braided, rich and lightly sweet, freshly baked challah is delicious on its own or smeared with softened butter. After a few days, it’s great dunked in custard and made into French toast for a decadent breakfast.
The best challah is rich with eggs, and it has a dark, shiny crust and a firm but light and tender texture. For our recipe, we tried using bread flour, but it made no significant improvement to loaves we made with the typical all-purpose, so we stuck with that.
We tested many different egg combinations (challah is known as egg bread, after all); for a tender texture and a rich but not overwhelmingly eggy flavor, we found two whole eggs and an additional yolk to be optimal.
We kept with tradition and made the bread dairy-free, using water and oil to hydrate and enrich the crumb instead of the milk and butter found in less authentic versions. (Happily, we found that the challah made with water had a lighter and more appealing texture.) Just ¼ cup of sugar sweetened the loaf and also contributed to its browned exterior.
The recommended shape for challah in most recipes is a simple three-rope braid. Shaped this way, however, our eggy dough rose out instead of up. Some recipes call for braiding six strands for a higher loaf, but this can get complicated — unless you have skills in origami.
Our solution was to make two three-strand braids, one large and one small, and place the smaller braid on top of the larger one. We brushed the loaf with an egg-water mixture before putting it in the oven to produce an evenly brown, shiny crust — the finishing touch to our handsome challah.