The only challah recipe you’ll ever need
If you don’t have the patience for breadmaking (or for baking at all), chances are you’ll still find challah, the enriched bread often served on the Jewish sabbath and during the High Holy Days, not only manageable but fun.
Compared with more technical breads like sourdough loaves or baguettes, challah is mostly hands-off, with an easy-to-handle dough. Plaiting it into a braid is pleasantly tactile, and the end result always looks impressive, even if your braiding skills are average. The loaves are also versatile, lending themselves equally well to sweet preparations (bread pudding and cinnamon toast) and savory ones (sandwiches and accompaniments to soups, stews and saucy braises).
But challah is still bread, so all the principles of sound breadmaking — fermentation, bakers’ percentages and gluten development, to name a few — apply.
As a challah lover and avid home bread baker, I wanted to create a classic recipe that not only has a rich, lightly sweet crumb and thready, pull-apart texture, but also integrates core breadmaking techniques to maximize your chances at success.
This particular recipe is forgiving, flexible and doable in a day. And that it’s rooted in technique makes it a fantastic gateway bread. If you’re bread-curious but not sure where to begin, start here. With Rosh Hashana starting on the evening of Sept. 25, make it now so you can enter the holiday baking season with a bit of bread experience under your belt.
Start with a sponge
Many challah recipes call for mixing an unusually high proportion of yeast directly into the dough. Because active dry yeast, the most common yeast for home bakers, isn’t very efficient in a high-sugar, low-moisture dough like challah, adding a lot of yeast accelerates fermentation.
But a more rapid fermentation comes at the expense of taste and texture. So instead, I take the extra step of making a sponge by mixing a portion of the flour with water and a small amount of yeast. Similar to a sourdough starter but made with commercial yeast rather than wild yeast, a sponge is a type of preferment that is later mixed into the dough. As the sponge sits, the yeasts feed on the starches in the flour and multiply, making the mixture active and bubbly and removing the need to add additional yeast to the final dough. This extra fermentation time leads to bread with a much-improved texture, aroma and flavor.
Finding ingredient balance
Also worth noting about the recipe are the proportions of salt and flour, and the mixing method. Generally, the weight of salt in a bread dough should equal 2% of the total flour weight, and even several pinches will fall well short of that for the average loaf of challah. Salt brings out the dough’s flavor and strengthens the gluten network, leading to a wellformed loaf. The 11 grams of salt here may seem like a lot, but it’s the correct amount.
The quantity of bread flour, in contrast, is left somewhat flexible to account for variation in how different brands absorb liquid. This recipe purposefully undershoots how much flour you’ll need and has you add more little by little during the kneading process until the dough texture is firm, elastic and supple, yet slightly tacky. (While you could use a stand mixer, I prefer to knead by hand, as it allows you to better assess the dough.)
A high proportion of olive oil (my fat of choice for challah, as it adds flavor and keeps it pareve, meaning it’s compatible with meat and dairy, according to kosher rules) inhibits gluten formation, so challah dough needs lots of kneading. Common in breadmaking, the windowpane test helps determine if you’ve developed sufficient gluten: Pinch off a golf ballsize piece of dough, flatten it, then slowly and gently stretch it outward in all directions until it’s so thin that light can pass through. Hitting this mark ensures the crumb comes out bready and stretchy instead of crumbly.
Let it all take shape
You can configure the dough into any shape you like — a round loaf with raisins, for example, is traditional for Rosh Hashana — but I think the most beautiful rendering is a six-strand braid. It looks like a smaller braid woven into the surface of larger braid, creating wonderful height and dimension. As it’s one of the more complex braiding techniques, you might want to practice with ribbon beforehand, or feel free to fall back on a simpler three-strand braid.
These details might make challah sound more complex than it really is, but in fact the undertaking is fairly straightforward. The various tests built into the recipe (which will be familiar to many home bread bakers) will help you achieve the light but rich, supple and soft texture essential to good challah.
Once you have a feel for the process, you’re well positioned to try other breads like focaccia or a sandwich loaf. But challah is so wonderfully versatile that I wouldn’t be surprised if you decided to stick with it for a while. Try your hand at different braiding techniques, make lots of French toast and even use the dough to bake hamburger buns, sweet rolls and babka. It’s good and easy enough to be your one-and-only bread.
CHALLAH BREAD
Makes: 1 large loaf
Total time: 1 hour 20 minutes, plus proofing and cooling
For the preferment:
1 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 ¼ cups bread flour
For the dough:
½ cup golden raisins (optional)
⅓ cup honey
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 large egg yolk, at room temperature
2 large eggs, at room temperature, plus 1 beaten egg, for egg wash
3 cups bread flour, plus more for kneading the dough
11 grams kosher salt (about 1 tablespoon Diamond Crystal or1 ½ teaspoons Morton coarse kosher salt) Poppy or sesame seeds, for sprinkling (optional)
1. Make the preferment: In a medium bowl, combine the yeast and ¼ cup warm tap water (100 to 110 degrees), and whisk until the yeast is dissolved. Add another ½ cup room temperature water and the bread flour, and stir with a flexible spatula or bowl scraper until you have a smooth, pasty mixture with no dry spots. It should look like a thick batter.
2. Scrape the mixture into the center of the bowl and cover tightly. Let the preferment sit at room temperature until it’s nearly tripled in size, extremely bubbly across the surface and jiggles on the verge of collapsing when the bowl is shaken, 1 to 2 hours (depending on the ambient temperature).
3. If making a raisinstudded challah, while preferment is getting bubbly, place raisins in a medium bowl and cover with boiling water. Cover bowl and let the raisins soak until they’re plumped and softened, 15 to 20 minutes. Drain the raisins, pat them dry and set aside. 4. Mix the dough: In a medium bowl, whisk together the honey, olive oil, the yolk and 2 of the eggs until smooth, then add to the bowl with the preferment. Add the bread flour and salt. Use a flexible spatula or bowl scraper to stir the mixture, making sure to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl to incorporate the preferment, until a shaggy dough comes together.
5. Knead the dough: Generously flour the work surface, then scrape the dough and any floury bits out of the bowl and onto the surface (reserve the bowl). Generously flour the dough. Use the heel of your hands to knead the dough, adding flour as needed if the dough is sticking to your hands or the surface, until the dough is very smooth, elastic and slightly tacky,
10 to 15 minutes. (You can also combine everything in a stand mixer and mix on low speed with the dough hook for 8 to 10 minutes, adding more flour as needed until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl.)
6. Test the dough: Pinch off a golf ball-size piece and flatten it with your fingertips. Stretch the dough outward in all directions gently and slowly: You should be able to form a sheet of dough that’s thin enough to allow light to pass through without tearing. If the dough tears, continue kneading. For a raisin-studded challah, use your hands to flatten the dough into a 1-inch-thick slab (the shape doesn’t matter) and scatter the drained raisins over the dough. Roll up the dough and gather it back into a ball, then knead until the raisins are distributed throughout.
7. Let the dough rise: Gather the dough into a smooth ball, dust lightly with flour and place back in the reserved bowl. Cover and let the dough sit in a warm spot until it’s doubled in size, 1 to 2 hours (depending on the ambient temperature).
8. Divide the dough: Punch down the dough inside the bowl to expel the gases that built up during the first rise, then scrape the dough out onto a clean work surface. For a braided loaf, use a bench scraper or knife to divide the dough into 6 equal pieces. (You can eyeball it, or weigh the pieces for accuracy — each piece should weigh 180 to 190 grams.) For a round loaf, divide the dough in half.
9. Braid or twist the dough: For a braid, roll each of the 6 pieces into snakes measuring about 18 inches long and slightly tapered at the ends. Dust the strands in flour to coat them lightly, then line them up so they’re side by side. Pinch together the ends of the strands to connect them at the top.
10. Take the strand on the far right and cross it over the other strands, so it’s all the way on the far left side, placing it perpendicular to the other strands. Then, take the strand that was originally on the far left and is now second from the left, and bring it all the way to the far right, also placing it perpendicularly.
11. Fan out the remaining strands so there’s a generous space in the center. Take the strand on the far left and bring it to the center, but group it with the strands on the right. Next, bring the strand that’s second from the right and cross it over to the far left, also placing it perpendicular. Then, fan out the strands again, leaving a space in the center, and bring the strand on the far right to the center, grouping it with the strands on the left. Bring the strand second from the left to the far right and cross it over to the far left. Then, repeat this process until you’ve braided the entire length of the strands, tugging gently on the strands as you work to create tension in the braid. Pinch the ends of the braids and tuck them underneath the loaf, then transfer to a parchmentlined sheet pan. Make sure you have a couple of inches of clearance on either side of the braid so it can expand.
12. Alternatively, for a round loaf, roll the two pieces of dough into long snakes measuring about 28 inches long, making sure to taper the snakes at one end. Dust the strands in flour to coat them lightly, then line them up so they’re side by side with the tapered ends aligned. Twist the two strands together, then start at the tapered end and roll up the twist into a tight coil, wrapping the fatter end around and tucking the end underneath the coil. Transfer the coil to a parchment-lined sheet pan.
13. Egg wash and proof the dough: Beat the remaining egg in a small bowl until it’s streak-free. Brush the loaf with the egg, then loosely cover the dough with some lightly oiled plastic wrap on a sheet pan, and let it rise at room temperature until it’s doubled in size, extremely puffy, and springs back but holds a slight indentation when poked gently with a wet finger, another 1 ½ to 2 hours (possibly longer, depending on ambient temperature). The dough is easy to underproof, so if you’re unsure, err on the side of over-proofing. (The round loaf will also take longer to proof.) Alternatively, before proofing, you can refrigerate the dough overnight, but omit the egg wash and make sure it’s covered (plastic should cover it loosely but be sealed around the pan so the dough doesn’t dry out).
14. Heat the oven: Arrange a rack in the center of the oven and heat it to 350 degrees. 15. Bake: Uncover the challah and brush with another layer of egg wash. Sprinkle the loaf with poppy or sesame seeds (if using) and bake until the loaf is shiny and burnished, an instant-read thermometer registers 190 degrees when inserted into the center, and it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom, 35 to 40 minutes. Let the challah cool completely on the baking sheet.
Note: The challah, stored in a paper bag at room temperature, will keep for 4 days. It benefits from toasting after the first day.