Claire Saffitz Makes Challah Bread | Dessert Person

oops i guess i'm i've got some sugar in this look you guys the kroger bouche pages are stuck together from all the sugar from when we made it my sister called me after the croquembouche episode and was like claire there's sugar in my entire kitchen the pages are literally stuck together hey everyone i'm claire welcome to my home kitchen today i'm showing you a recipe that i make all the time that i really love it's my honey tahini holla paula is a traditional jewish bread it's a little bit sweet but it also is just a delicious thing to have around great for toast french toast and it's really fun to make [Music] paula is an enriched bread so that means it has eggs and a little bit of sugar added to it the major twist in this recipe is that i add tahini to it tahini is a sesame paste and there's already sesame seeds on top and when i tried this recipe i sort of was like well let's see what happens if i add some tahini to the dough and it contributes great sesame flavor i mean it's subtle but you can really sense it in the background and it also creates a really silky texture to the bread itself it's a recipe made totally by hand great for novices and really impressive i've braided a lot of holla and i go with just the simple three-strand method so if you know how to braid hair you can braid holla if you don't know how to braid hair i would say watch a youtube video although i'll go over it you don't know what i mean it's like i don't i can't i guess i can't even teach people how to braid it's not that hard [Music] so no special equipment i'm doing the whole thing by hand it is an easy dough to work with so there's no need to use a stand mixer and the dough hook you could if you like i have a mixing bowl sheet tray with some parchment paper a spatula a pastry brush for the egg wash at the end that's really good ingredients i'm using bread flour then i have a mix of three yolks and two whole eggs plus an additional egg for brushing on top of the dough before we bake olive oil sesame seeds for the sprinkling over top tahini honey active dry yeast kosher salt and then some water to help proof the yeast and bring it all together so i'm going to start by mixing my dry ingredients which is really just salt and flour so this is four and a four and a third cups bread flour two teaspoons diamond kosher if you're using morton kosher salt do half that i'm using a combination of yolks and whole eggs and that's because yolks create a really rich delicious bread olive oil is my fat of choice for chala you could use vegetable oil i've seen it made with butter although usually with hala it's something called parv which means for people who keep kosher it's nice to have no dairy in the recipe because then you can have it with with meat so you're not really mixing them so using oil instead of butter i like olive because i like the flavor and then honey i like i love the combination of olive oil and honey the first thing i'm going to do is proof the yeast using active dry yeast my go-to the easiest kind of yeast to find i'm going to proof this in a quarter cup of warm water now if you have doubts about your yeast add a couple drops of honey to this mixture and you'll be able to that should encourage it to puff and foam and then you'll know if your yeast is alive i know that this yeast is alive so i'm really just dissolving it here one thing i've started doing is just adding these directly to the dough if you are really confident that your yeast is alive just you can skip this step and add the liquid to the rest of the recipe and the yeast to the dry ingredients [Music] i have a half cup of additional water i'll add my yeast mixture that is yeast action so i know that this is good i'm gonna add my yeast mixture then everything else my three yolks plus two whole eggs the olive oil it's a third of a cup of olive oil i'm adding a lot of other fat in the form of the tahini because there's all that sesame oil in there so keep in mind that the tahini is also a source of fat and richness so when i measured out the ingredients for this last night first i measured in a actually in this measuring cup i measured out the olive oil and then i poured it into a container then i had already had oil coating this measuring cup and i used that for the honey and i do that intentionally because having an oil residue in the cup allows the honey to slip right out and it makes it really easy to measure so you don't have to then sit there and scrape out every last bit of honey the whole thing just kind of like moves out of the measuring cup so i recommend even if you're not measuring out oil first you can give it like a little spray with some pam or something and then oil this container so see how it's clinging to the sides i should have boiled this although it is sort of sliding out a little bit the measuring cup was oiled this thing not so much basically that's what you're going to eat [Music] honey quality varies wildly from brand to brand so this is kind of a this is a local honey from the catskills that has a really strong delicious concentrated flavor this is the sweetener for the whole recipe and the more flavorful honey you have the more you're going to taste it in the final bread i just wouldn't go so far as to use a chestnut honey um or something like really really strong like that because it'll make it a little bit bitter but just it's worth buying a high quality honey like a farmer's market honey is a good one rather than just the you know the generic bear at the grocery store good for allergies yeah oh there you go okay so treat your allergies homeopathically and support local honey farms or bee keepers there we go i got there eventually so i'm just mixing all this together just breaking up the eggs and the yolks you don't have to make it super smooth this goes into my bowl of flour honey is really dense so that's subtle to the bottom make sure you scrape all of it in i'm going to take my spatula and i'll just start to incorporate the flour into the liquid we want to bring together the ingredients into a dough honey does crystallize but you can just warm it and it will melt and come back together never grows mold never spoils apparently i don't know if this is true or not but i've read this before honey has been found in the tombs of egyptian pharaohs and it is still good which is mind-blowing if you think about it so once you have everything come together scrape it out onto your work surface i'm going to sit here and knead it until i have something smooth and elastic and if it becomes really sticky i'll just add more flour essentially the dough is has been greased because of all the oil that i've added to it okay so kneading technique i use both hands i have my feet slightly apart one in front of the other and i use that so i can have sort of a rocking motion and i use my two hands and kneading really happens with this fleshy part like the heel of your hand everyone has sort of their own technique but for me and what i think is sort of standard is a kind of pushing away motion with the heel of your hand and then using the other hand to help fold and repeat and the dose order rotates as you work so fold the dough over i fold it toward me and then push away with the heel of my hand then i give the whole thing a 90 degree-ish turn fold push away again and so having my feet a little bit apart helps me to gain a little momentum as i need but that's the basic motion and so you'll see like i'm getting a little bit of stickage to the surface and that's when you can add a little bit of flour it might also be sticking to your hands in which case add a little flour but you want to be here for a little while we want to really work this dough so i'm at the state where i shouldn't i probably don't need to add much more flour the dough is still it's soft but not sticky it's a little bit tacky and i'll explain what that means basically when you poke your finger in and you lift it out the dough see how it's right there it clings to the finger but then we'll release it looks good the surface is very smooth i have that sort of loss of stickiness that's another indication that you have needed it sufficiently so i'm going to let this rise now i have a large bowl i'm just going to oil the bowl very very lightly so i have a little extra olive oil here the dough itself i'll give a slight slick but in general it's not sticky so this is the shape that you want it in for rising and i'm going to put it inside the bowl and now i'll cover it and this should sit in a room temperature or slightly warm spot until it has about doubled in size and actually i just have a swap so we're going to do that now so i made this dough and i stuck it right in the fridge and it rose a little bit as it sat in the fridge but generally that cold temp slowed the activity of the yeast so i've it's been sitting out for a few hours you can see when i poke the surface and it's it's cold so the dough is firmer that there's air inside so when i press down the gas inside like it springs back and then i leave a slight indentation it is basically doubled in size so now i am ready to portion the dough you could make one giant hollow with this but i think that more appropriately is to make two medium-sized holla i could weigh it to make sure that i'm portioning out six even pieces so i'm doing six pieces so you know each is a three strand braid but i don't really feel like getting my scale out so i'm going to eyeball it there's still some there's a lot of air in here i'm going to end up deflating it as i form the strands the dough is nice and light from each half i'm going to do three so i'm just sort of flattening this and working it into a rectangle shape and then i'm going to sort of roll it up into a little log if i were to go straight from here into a strand it would be a little bit wrinkled a little bit rough not super smooth so this pre-shaping this is just something that you can do to make a really professional looking braid [Music] the dimensions are up to you it's about if you want a long skinny braid a sort of more short and squat braid but i'm going to go with two slightly squatter lows so i can make them side by side so i have it positioned seam side down and then you start in the middle of the strand with your palms applying downward pressure as you roll and lengthen and i like to actually do more of a tapered piece of dough where the side the edges are a little bit thinner and the center of that strand is a little bit thicker i have a little bit of a seam right here so i'm going to position it seam side down in general i have a nice smooth strand and transfer that to my baking sheet and i'm going to keep rolling with the remaining pieces remember to pinch that seam so it doesn't come apart as you roll and if you feel like your pieces of dough are not extending and they're shrinking back as you roll let them rest a little bit longer [Music] now everyone's method of braiding is a little bit different most commonly you'll see instructions that say pinch all the ends together and start braiding from one side straight to the other i find that i can achieve the most visually pleasing and even braid by actually starting in the center and moving in one direction then turning it around and braiding in the other direction you have the middle strand and then a left and a right you start by taking from either side i'll start with the left the left strand and crossing it over the middle strand so that now you have the left goes into the center then you do the same thing from the alternate side so the right the right crosses over the center and that becomes the new center strand left crosses over center becomes the new center alternating the right side does the same crosses over you see hollas where like the strands have fused together and it looks more like a loaf if you want to prevent that from happening you can coat them in a little bit of flour so as i braid i am tugging on this pieces of dough and creating tension to braid something really tight so i'm going to keep going just from this side and i get down to those little thin ends and pinch together and then i like to tuck so i take the edge of the braid and i just tuck it under itself and i have this sort of beautiful finished look and then i sort of push it up toward the center and make it a little thicker okay so now i'm going to repeat that same process going in the opposite direction and instead of crossing over i'm going to go under and that's going to make the same pattern of braid to finish the strands so turn it around instead of crossing over i'm going to cross under and that's going to basically braid it in the same direction in the opposite way if you're more comfortable braiding the way that you know which is maybe just starting from one end and going in a single direction then go ahead and do that i would say it's like my mom says when she's talking about directions the way to go is the way you know do whatever is most comfortable and but this is just the way that i find i make the prettiest looking braid i push in from both sides just to make it a little shorter because it's kind of long and there we go that's our braid so i have my two they look really good these are going to expand quite a bit now i want to cover them and let them rise a second time with active dry yeast we're always going to do two rises one that's called bulk where it's the full amount of dough all at once and then after we shape them the second rise the rise is relatively slow it's a little sluggish it should take maybe an hour and a half or so and then i'll egg wash top of sesame and bake [Music] well they're going to be huge and probably should have put them on two trays so i knew i should have put them on two baking sheets but i didn't and i did it anyway one of my signatures but it'll be fine so now before i put them in the oven i'm gonna do a little bit of an egg wash i should just say that these took a while to rise and we all got very sleepy and we just lived out my dream as an adult which was to take an apple i'm at work so i just want to say i took a 15-minute snooze and i feel great taking this last egg and go ahead and beat the egg so no streaks remain so give these a little sponge bath bag i will say this is a relatively slow rising recipe and i'm not sure why because there's plenty of sugar in the dough but if yours is taking a while i promise you it will rise just let it let it go longer you probably did not mess it up these are going to expand in the oven so any concentration of sesame seeds you have on there now will like they'll spread out so i go really heavy on the sesame and this is white raw sesame hulled nothing will stick to the dough without the egg wash so it creates shine but it also gives the topping something to adhere to my oven has been preheating to 350. i'm going to bake these i'll rotate the baking sheet one time and it'll go for about a half an hour and i am just going to bake them until i see a very deep golden brown in they go about half an hour 30 to 35 and i'll check it after about 20 and give the pan a 180 rotation [Music] i let these fully cool your bread is done when you tap the iron side and it sounds hollow i realize that's not a great test because you don't really know that you can't really do that test until it's cooled so at that point if it's under done you can't bake it again but that's just to reassure you that it is done it's fully cooled i'm going to slice into it it's actually traditional to tear hollow rather than cut it but i want to get a clean slice so i'll show you what it looks like you can actually see a little bit of the swirl in the dough but it's really light it has this great kind of pull apart almost like it forms threads or shreds if you if you see what i'm talking about so that is a texture that i like and it has such a great softness and silkiness that i think is partly attributed to the tahini in it now the cell the scent it's a little bit redolent of sesame from the tahini but it's not like a pancho in your face when i've brought this over for people to try they sort of taste it they're like what is that in the background so i really like the subtlety of it it contributes a lot in terms of flavor and texture and this is just i don't know i feel like i grew up eating not very good challah so it's a real pleasure to eat something with such a great texture i mean at this point dessert person the book came out six months ago and which means i wrote the book going on like two years ago so a lot of these recipes i haven't made in a long time hey everyone i'm claire welcome to my home kitchen today i'm showing you a recipe that i make all the time that i really love and it's such a pleasure to revisit them and be reminded that oh yeah it's really good i really like making it it's a great version of what you know what the thing and um is me feel good about myself this is super tasty so i hope you give it a try i think you'll find that a little bit of tahini in your hala is a great addition and this is this is a real like dessert person kind of recipe classic with a little interesting kind of twist so thank you for watching like and subscribe [Music]

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 576,054

Keywords: baking, challah bread, challah bread recipe, challah, challah recipe, challah french toast, homemade challah, how to make challah, how to make challah bread, how to make bread, bread recipe, Claire Saffitz, Claire Makes, Claire Makes Challah, Claire Saffitz Dessert Person, Dessert Person, How To Braid Challah, How To Braid Challah Bread, challah bread recipe easy, easy challah bread, best challah bread, make easy challah bread, bon appetit, gourmet makes, bake, dessert, recipe

Id: y394gJelE-U

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Emptymoleskine]

After howmany years of producing food videos Vince says, 'So basically the ingredients become food!'

[u/pureimaginatrix]

Omg the winking mixing bowl (2:05 I think?) was hilarious! I love all the Vinny snark in this video. Missed the cats though.

[u/[deleted]]

This is excellent. The first recipe I tried from the book. Please try it folks!

[u/quamquam11]

I made this from the book and unfortunately it was a little dry which I think might have been due to slightly overcooking.