Claire Saffitz Makes Perfect Challah and Babka | Try This at Home | NYT Cooking

that's so good oh i have to stop myself i'm a picker it's a bad habit i like to if i wasn't thinking and there was like a pecan pie or something i would seriously just come over and like pick off the top one by one it's so rude i really have to stop myself hey everyone i'm claire saffits and we are back with more episodes of try this at home in the past we've tackled some big projects like croissants and bagels and today i'm showing you a slightly simpler recipe but is no less versatile and it is classic chala bread and it's surprisingly simple it's a great recipe for beginners who are just trying to get into bread making you don't need a stand mixer the whole thing is done by hand and then i'm going to show you a couple different ways to shape it and then another application which is a cinnamon vodka so love making this recipe so versatile so good and so fun to make [Music] i have a lot of memories of eating challah i mean i'm jewish i grew up in saint louis going to reform jewish congregation where there was just a challah you know for like all occasions my first memories are eating like store-bought holla and i did not like it but i love making it a home and i've come to really appreciate the qualities of valhalla so chala is a an enriched bread dough so enriched meaning there's eggs and fat added to it i noticed when i was doing research and looking at a lot of different recipes for hala that a lot of them call for like a really large quantity of yeast like you know tablespoons of yeast to make one or two loaves and generally speaking the smaller amount of yeast the longer the fermentation the better the quality of the bread the better the flavor the better the texture so i wanted to use kind of sound bread making principles in this challah to achieve not just something like really beautiful and tasty but to make like a really good quality crumb and have you know that tends to like stale slower and just last longer and just overall tastes better [Music] so the first step of the recipe is to do something called a pre-ferment a pre-ferment is a mixture of like a portion of the flour and liquid in the recipe that's mixed with the yeast and is allowed to kind of like activate just at room temperature and then it's added to the dough it's really easy this is called a sponge so a teaspoon of yeast use a large bowl because this is the bowl that you're going to mix the rest of the dough in then i have some warm tap water here and i'm going to add just a quarter cup there's like a dehydrated coating around the yeast and active dry yeast it's to dissolve that and to get that yeast like woken up and ready to raise the bread so go ahead and whisk that together until the yeast is dissolved now a half cup of room temp tap water and this will cool it down a little bit because we want a nice slow fermentation then i'm going to add one and a quarter cups flour so about 170 grams and this is a portion of the flour in the final recipe so this goes in once you've added the flour go ahead you can use a flexible spatula like this or a bowl scraper and just stir until all the flour is hydrated and you'll have this kind of like thick looking batter kind of mixture so just you want to make sure there's no floury spots and i like to make sure the sides of the bowl are scraped down really really well but you don't need to mix beyond just like combining everything well okay so this is ready to go and now i'm going to cover this and let it sit instead of using plastic wrap you can just cover with like a dinner plate like this we're going to let this sit at room temperature until you'll notice like a dramatic transformation it will loosen up it will expand in volume a couple times even triple in volume and the surface will be super bubbly and even a little bit domed so it's going to look like it's on the verge of collapse and that's when it's ready to mix the dough [Music] so this is the sponge that we mixed a few hours ago it actually went like a little bit long the way that i know that it's like a little bit past its prime is because it's cratered a little bit so it was super domed and bubbly and there's like a little bit of a high water mark around the edge but that's okay if it goes a little bit past it's happened to me many times it's not that big of a deal but we do want to mix the dough as quickly as possible all of the water that is in the hot in the dough is already in the sponge so the only other liquid ingredients i have are eggs and then my sweetener and the fat so again i'm using olive oil and honey i just love the flavors in holla i have a third of a cup of olive oil then honey okay so then i'm going to add two whole eggs and one yolk this gets whisked together mostly just to break up the eggs then i'm going to add this to my bowl with our pre-ferment again everything just gets mixed here in this one bowl oh i should say i'm using bread flour here that's an important part of the recipe so bread flour is a high protein flour that and that higher protein corresponds to the amount of gluten that you can develop in the dough and it's that gluten that's really important to the structure of the chala the texture of the crumb all of that so i have three additional cups of bread flour again i recommend weighing everything then a tablespoon of salt so i'm using diamond crystal kosher salt it seems like a lot of salt but like it's a lot of dough it makes a really big loaf and you really do need all of that salt to like bring out the flavor of everything that's also important to the texture so now i'm going to use you can use a flexible spatula but i'm going to use a bowl scraper make sure you're scraping along the bottom of the bowl because you want to incorporate that pre from it and you can see it has this like kind of crazy stringy texture see that so we want to mix everything together and then make sure you have a clean work surface because we are going to need this by hand just right on the countertop if you wanted to use your stand mixer you certainly could you should mix your pre-ferment in the bowl of the stand mixer and then follow all these instructions and then i would actually still mix this part by hand because the dough hook doesn't like really easily get against the sides of the bowl so go ahead and mix everything like this by hand then pop it into the stand mixer with the dough hook okay this has mostly come together it's like a shaggy dough at the moment i have some little dry bits this makes a pretty sticky dough at first so i'm to really generously flour my work surface with some bench flour and then this whole mixture gets scraped out onto that surface then a little more flour over top and this is that stage where handling the dough and feeling it is really important because we are going to knead this together we're going to work it for a good like 10 to 15 minutes until it's super smooth and supple and i'll show you a test for when you know you're done with the kneading process so kneading is a process of working the dough and developing all of that gluten and it's a motion that is like folding and kind of pushing away i like to work with my left the sort of fleshy part of my left palm with my right hand on top for extra push and then really kind of like pressing the dough and sliding it across the surface then i give it a little rotation and a fold and it's that same kind of pushing away so i can tell at this stage that this dough it's not feeling particularly sticky so i might not need to add any additional flour but as you work it and that flour is like hydrated it might become a little bit sticky so if it starts to stick to your hand or the surface just add a little extra flour and you're going to keep adding flour as you go if at any point it gets a little bit sticky if it comes off on your hand if it sticks to your hand it's sticky but if it clings to your hand and then releases that's tacky okay so it's picked up like most of those dry bits and if you have little dry areas you can like run the dough over them to pick them up it's still pretty streaky and like modeled looking and so we want to just knead this until it becomes really smooth really supple nice and elastic also and this is like a good 10 or 15 minutes of kneading by hand so as i said the recipe is designed to be flexible depending on you know what kind of flour you're using his flowers absorb moisture differently so if you feel like you're adding a lot of flour don't be alarmed it's normal to have to add up to like even an additional half cup of flour as you as you need both as you need and as you need both both types of need i've been eating this for probably between 10 and 15 minutes so now i'm going to show you a test to determine if you're done with kneading and you're ready to move on to bulk fermentation so you're going to pinch off a piece of dough you just like pinch it off with your fingers like this so it's like a golf ball sized piece of dough more or less and you're going to take your fingertips and just flatten it out and then you're going to gently pull it apart in all directions and flatten it out further and the idea is what we're doing here is we're checking for sufficient gluten development so this is something called a windowpane test and you don't want to pull it too quickly you have to do it sort of slowly but what we want to achieve here is a almost film-like piece of dough that is so thin that light can pass through it and that is how you know that there is sufficient like elasticity in the dough and enough gluten development that you can proceed so here you can really see it's good to hold up to a light source to double check yeah so this is our window pane again if it tears before you get to this point go ahead and continue kneading and then just if you're there stick it back on the dough if you are making a raisin-studded hala which is the traditional challah that's eaten at rosh hashanah the jewish new year you're going to want to soak your raisins so i have a half cup of golden raisins and i just poured some hot water over them to hydrate them and plump them dried fruit particularly dried grapes or raisins has like a very high concentration of sugar and it's so high that will actually pull moisture from the dough and will dry out the dough if you don't soak it first so that's the purpose of soaking so these have been soaking they're nice and soft and plump i'm gonna drain them so i drained it and now i'm going to pat the raisins dry because otherwise if they're really wet it's going to be hard to incorporate them into the dough and now i'm going to show you how to incorporate them to knead them in what you want to do is flatten out the dough so just kind of press it with the heel of your hand it doesn't have to be any particular shape at all you just want to flatten it and create a lot of surface area now i just needed this dough so it's like a little bit springy if you're getting lots of spring back you can let it rest for like five minutes you can also use like the friction between the dough and the surface to help it flatten out a little bit so once you have it flattened out to like just under an inch thick you are then going to scatter the raisins over the surface and then gather everything up into a ball and then we're going to knead it until all the raisins are evenly distributed throughout so you can just kind of like you can roll it up or just kind of fold it up like this and this is just an easier way to do it it means that like all the raisins are enclosed and you're not dealing with like you know like raisins all over the surface and trying to pick them up and getting them into the center of the dough i can feel them like inside i don't love raisins i would not opt for this holla but i think it's a great option because it is so traditional but this is what i like about the recipe is you can use the dough in so many ways and this is just one application but so this is ready to go and we have several other doughs that we set up ahead of time to show you all the variations so this is just that one round variation for rosh hashanah and then we have our sixth strand and our cinnamon vodka so i'm really excited to get into that forming process but first we have to let this rise so as i said this goes into a bowl you can dust it with a little bit of flour first and then into a clean bowl we're going to let this sit at warm room temperature again something in a warm spot that's like in that 80 degree range is really good for proofing it's going to become super pillowy and soft and when you poke it it will spring back but leave a little indentation and that will take you know one to two hours possibly even longer depending on temperature [Music] we have our hollow dough that has risen so i want to show you what it looks like i would say double maybe even slightly more than doubled in size and i wish you could feel what it feels like because it is just like so pillowy underneath when i press down you can see that it springs back and that's an indication that there's lots of gas in there but then it holds an indentation so this looks great it feels great really excited to braid it into a six strand braid the first time i tried a six strand braid i was trying to read it from like a recipe and i was just like my brain could not i could not follow it and and it's a little bit tricky like if you lose your process during it it's a little hard to get back on track and to like see where you are but i'm going to walk you through all the steps it really does to me make the most beautiful braided hollow though the six strand braid so i'm gonna turn the dough out now i can't tell you exactly the weight that each piece will be because it depends on like how much flour you added and your dough in particular but it will be somewhere between 180 and 190 grams per piece so i like to oh i feel so good it's like really really fun to feel and handle it's just a really satisfying textural recipe i'm going to go with 190 per piece and see where that gets me 90. oh okay i'm really going to be more like oh i'm really going to be more like 180. you don't have to be this crazy about it you can if they're a couple grams off it's like no big deal at all i like to kind of like bundle everything up and tuck them in this tends to give you a really nice smooth strand now another thing you can do is if you feel like lots of big air bubbles in there go ahead and pop them and squeeze them because any big pockets of air is just going to make it difficult to roll out you shouldn't really need a lot of flour or even any flour at all again it's that friction between the surface and the dough that's going to help you lengthen it and and you know stretch it out to the size that you want so i'm just going to apply like even pressure along the length of my hands back and forth from the center outward and i also like to taper the pieces a little bit at the ends and that gives you this really nice evenly shaped braid now if you need additional friction like maybe your dough is stiff or you had a little extra flour and you're not able to get that friction with the surface you can just put like a couple drops of water on your surface and smear that around and that will help you like i'm not actually getting that much friction so i might use a tiny bit of water i literally just wet my hand all right that actually helped a lot okay so let's see the length on this guy all right that's about 18 inches so now i'm going to just roll out all of my portions of dough to the same length and then once you have one measure just use it as your benchmark for the rest so all of my strands have been now like elongated and lengthened into these ropes now i'm ready to start braiding i'm going to do one quick step though i have some bench flower right here i'm going to dust the strands really lightly in flour just to coat them so if you like mess up and you have to go back and un-braid then you know you won't have like lots of sticking it also helps to preserve some definition in between the strands as it bakes so i like this little step dust them a little bit and then i like to kind of like give them a give them a roll through the flower i'm going to now orient the strands vertically so i'm going to line them all up next to each other okay so now to start your braid you are going to pinch everything together at the very top so just bring all the ends together and pinch and now here's where you want to pay extra close attention when i was teaching myself how to do this i looked at youtube videos i because you really have to see it done it's so hard to follow when it's being described in words so have your laptop next to you while you're doing this have a clean finger for like hitting you know like the space bar to start and stop the video and just follow along with me i'll go slow so the first step is going to be to cross the outer right strand so that's on the far left like you don't want to apply too much tension at this point so just kind of loosely bring that over and then you're going to take what was originally the far left strand and which is now second from the left so this one right here and you're going to cross it all the way over to the far right so you have this little twist here at the top okay so then take your other strands and separate them a bit with a space in the middle so you have a group of two here and a group of two here okay so you're going to take that very first strand we moved that was over here and that is now up here the one that is on top so you see how this one is crossed on the bottom and this one's crossed on the top you're going to take the one on top and you're going to move it down toward the center but you are going to group it with the ones on the right so that one on the top if you're moving from the left is going to come down and be grouped with your two strands here on the right this folds down like so so now i have a group of three strands right here i'm going to take the second strand from the right or the kind of outermost strand from the group of three and i'll cross it all the way over to the far left so now again i have my two strands out to the sides then i have my four strands here in the middle with two on the left and two on the right then i'm going to take the strand on the top right which is now the one on top so i have my horizontal strands here the one on top bring it down to the middle and i'm moving from the right so i'm going to group it with the two strands on the left just bear with me okay so you're going to take the one of the two sort of horizontal strands the one on top and bring it down to the middle grouping it with the strands on the opposite side so moving from the right to grouping with the strands on the left now i have a grouping of three strands on this side i'm going to take the outermost strand or the second from the left and cross this one over here so it is just a matter of repeating that motion taking the sort of of the strands that are on the sides taking the one on top moving it to the center and grouping it with the strands on the opposite side so now when this is how you know if you're getting lost in the process take a look at your setup i can see here that i have three strands on this side so i know i have to move the outer strand to the opposite side and now taking the strand that's on top moving it from far right to like center left now i have three strands over here i'm going to take the outer strand of the of the grouping of three move it to the far right and just continue that process does this make sense yeah okay it's a pattern all right okay now once you get to that once you've done it a couple times and you get into this where you get the feel of it start to apply a little bit of tension so like you want to create a little bit of tension in the braid and that's going to help you get a really nice rise out of your dough so that just means like giving it like a nice little tug as you work so you see like i'm ever so gently tugging on it as i move it over and you can see that it makes this like incredibly beautiful pattern with like a sort of center tall braid and then like a lower braid underneath it's so pretty so okay so i'm kind of at the point where it's like i can't really figure out my next step anymore so this is where i just kind of i'm like well bye bye you know tablespoon of dough or whatever so that's perfectly fine okay so now i have this beautiful like long kind of skinnier braid and now i'm just going to transfer it to my lined baking sheet if you you know you can use like a bench scraper a bowl scraper to help you or you can just kind of lift it up so kind of rock it over this looks so pretty i'm so excited about it and now we are going to let this proof but before i let it rise i'm actually going to do a quick layer of egg wash now what i love about holla is that incredibly burnished shiny exterior and the best way to achieve that is to do two layers of egg wash i'm just going to do a thin layer across like every little bump of dough you don't want like lots of pooling egg on the baking sheet so just you know a thin a thin but thorough layer okay so spoiler here is the baked holla and here is my unproofed braid so this is really important because i want you to see the size difference i one time spoke to a baker who told me that the point of bread making is to take the smallest amount of ingredients and make them as big as possible this is what i want to illustrate here is like how important the proofing process is is you want to get from here to here like the first couple times i made this i underproved it because i was going for that like just normal doubled in size kind of look and it really needs to go longer the egg wash here is like a little bit sticky and so i'm going to oil the plastic wrap that's an important step so you want to cover it loosely with plastic so i kind of just like drape it let it fall on there as loosely as i can [Music] so now that we saw the six strand braid i'm going to show you the the technique performing the round which is way way easier so i'm going to uncover this this is the dough that we mixed this morning and you can see same texture like just so that's one of the don't be alarmed it's not bruised this is just like a smeared raisin don't look at that same texture just like so so pillowy so airy it's really so much fun to like touch now i don't need the scale for this because the forming is so much simpler and evenness is much less important so i'm just going to divide the dough in half and this is i really can just eyeball it it's much less important that these are the same weight okay and now i'm going to take each piece and roll roll each one into a long snake that's about 28 inches long i like to pinch not only to start to lengthen it and form the shape but to squeeze out any big air pockets because that just makes it harder so same basic like proportions of the snakes so you know mostly even but slightly tapered at the ends that makes the forming a little bit easier and you can see that like even if maybe you hadn't like needed your raisins throughout really thoroughly but this technique like this forming shape they'll be really evenly distributed even if you didn't need them in so thoroughly so i'm going to take my two strands i'm going to cross one over the other so right in the center making an x okay so then you're going to go on one side and you're going to twist the strands and again this is going to help you create tension in the dough and it's that tension that's going to form like a really nice even tall loaf okay so and then go ahead and twist the other side as well okay and then you're just going to start at one end of your twist and you are going to start to fold it in on itself and coil the dough and then once you get to the end just kind of bring that around and now you have this like beautiful tall it looks i think like more ornate than it really is to form on there but really a quick way to form around and then same thing some oiled plastic wrap and we're gonna look for the same indicators of doneness before we bake [Music] okay this is a fully proofed braided hollow dough so i'm going to show you the indicators of a fully proof loaf and i do think that under proofing is one of sort of the potential pitfalls of this recipe it is easy to kind of like jump the gun a little bit and put it in the oven prematurely so you want to really make sure that you see that size expansion this is like to me easily doubled in size and visually like i can see i can almost see the little air bubbles underneath and it's super super light and when i press onto the dough it springs back pretty quickly but leaves an indentation so this looks great i'm going to give it a final layer of egg wash and i have my oven on 350. be careful when you're applying the egg wash because there's so much air in there that you don't want to like poke the dough or deflate anything or puncture it anywhere also keep in mind that you could refrigerate the dough i forgot to mention this when we after the shaping but you could refrigerate the unproofed loaf also with the egg wash and the oil piece of plastic and then pull it out of the fridge the next day and let it proof on the countertop and because it's starting cold it's going to take a little bit longer but a good option if you want to kind of divide up the timing and the work okay so i'm going to go into the oven this will bake for 30 to 35 and i'm looking for like super deep golden brown color it will sound hollow on the bottom when tapped and i can also take the internal temperature if i'm not sure so if you if it's a really well proofed dough you shouldn't really need to take the temperature the color indicator should be enough but if you're unsure you can always stick a thermometer in the center and look for like 190 to 200 to register so 30 to 35 minutes oh sorry one thing if you want to add sesame seeds or poppy seeds this is the time to do it do it after that second layer of egg wash they'll stick really well i like to be super generous with it but i'm going to leave this one plain so we can just appreciate the raw beauty of the braid [Music] this is my raisin holla it has been proofing for maybe like an hour and a half that looks great one fantastic application of our holodough is bobcat and this is a cinnamon bobcat and i kept it dairy-free because we know that the dough is dairy-free so why add it you know we're doing the filling keep it parv plus i'm kind of doubling down on like the olive oil flavor and this is such a wonderful and like slightly unexpected version of cinnamon vodka so the dough you know we make a full recipe a dough divide it in half and you make two bobkas you'll need two loaf pans i have a piece of parchment paper i cut the width of the parchment paper to fit the length of the loaf pan like that and i have a little additional olive oil here for brushing okay so i have just a thin layer of oil the parchment just gets pressed down into the bottom and up the sides and smooth it really well try to eliminate any air bubbles if you can then i have a little bit of excess and that excess is useful for lifting the vodka out of the pan just to prevent like the edges of the parchment from folding over and sticking to the surface of the vodka i like to just give them a little fold so as the bobcat bakes some of that like brown sugary filling seeps into the bottom and it mixes with the oil and it makes this like olive oily caramel it's so so yummy don't get me wrong i love butter flavor butter flavor is great but it's such a satisfying kind of spin on like you know a buttery bobcat that kind of thing okay so you can set that aside then i'm gonna mix my filling so as i said i have almond flour and brown sugar and then salt and a tablespoon of ground cinnamon then i'm also going to grate into this bowl a teaspoon of finely grated orange zest i love the combination of like brown sugar and orange zest and orange can be overwhelming really really easily but just a little bit of zest kind of perfumes everything and it's the kind of like kind of flavor where when you taste it you're like what is that you know like what's that sort of extra little layer of flavor it's really good so then just mix this together really really well crush any little lumps of brown sugar or almond flour if you come across them i'm going to set aside a quarter cup of this mixture and this is going to be what i sprinkle on top so when i was developing the recipe i kept going back and forth like should i top it with a glaze should i top it with a streusel and i just settled on sprinkling some of the filling on top because it gives me like that texture that i want and a little extra sweetness and i don't have to add an additional step so the first step of the recipe is to have your holo dough ready to go when you poke it you can see that the dough springs back which is an indication there's lots of air in there but it leaves an indentation so this is this looks great i'm gonna turn it out and divide it in half so i'm just going to eyeball half and then while you're rolling out one half because you don't want the other half of the dough to continue to ferment and rise you're going to put this on like a small rim baking sheet or on a dinner plate cover it and stick it in the fridge so now i'm going to roll this out i'm going to dust a little bit of flour on my work surface so go ahead i mean you're going to knock all the gas out because you're going to roll it but i like to sort of press it into the shape that i want with my fingers first and i'm going to roll this out into a very long rectangle about 24 inches long and eight inches wide go ahead and roll this out and i have a little bit of flour but i'm not going to use too much because a little bit of friction between the work surface and the dough is really useful that helps to extend the dough because i want this to be pretty thin and i want it to be thin because i want like a nice dramatic spiral inside the bob cup okay so i think i'm almost at eight if it's springing back really stubbornly because we are rolling it out really thin just lightly cover it on the work surface and let it rest for five or ten minutes cover it with a damp towel so for forming the vodka i have a quarter cup of olive oil four tablespoons but that's for two vodka so i'm gonna drizzle just two tablespoons or half that amount across the surface and this is what really like creates that caramelized layer on the bottom it's that mingling between the olive oil and the brown sugar and go ahead and brush this across the surface of the dough and leave a little bit of a border on the longer side that's facing away from you so not this side but the far side but you can go all the way to every other edge then i'm going to sprinkle half of the filling you're just going to cover the entire surface but again avoiding that little clean border on the further long side so once you do that now i'm going to go ahead and pat the filling into the surface and spread it around so it's i have an even layer everywhere okay it's really even and now i'm going to roll it up so i'm going to start at the end closest to me and roll away so it's helpful to start with just like a little you know working from one side to the other like left to right or right to left just to kind of start that spiraled effect and one thing i also like to do is to like give it a little bit of a tug as i'm going to help stretch out the dough kind of stretch it toward you and then roll and that will help to create a more defined spiral so now it's all rolled up into this kind of tight spiraled log and then once you have it rolled up it's resting on that seam or i had that clear that clean border of dough and i like to give it like a little pinch just to seal the dough right there and this is also an opportunity to even out the thickness a little bit okay now i'm ready to form the twist so the vodka has this kind of like double double spiral when you cut it open because i twist together this log so i'm just going to trim off the ends just where it's like a little er the thickness is irregular and i want to basically trim off anywhere that i don't have like full coverage of the filling and then i'm going to cut it in half crosswise you can see it's starting to shrink back a little bit so then you're going to take your pieces of dough you're going to cross one over the other in the center like an x and now i'm going to twist them so twisting from one side i'm going to twist like this and then i'm going to go on to the other side and twist the rest of the way so now i have this beautiful twist and then this is going to go into your prepared loaf pan and now the final step before i let these proof is to like press down and flatten that twist a little bit just so it fills out some of the bottom so this is our vodka it is ready for its second rise that's the proof stage so i'm going to cover it and let it sit again in like a warm room temperature spot i'm going to show you the indicators of doneness when it's proved then i'll show you how to like you know finish it with that little bit of extra topping and bake it in the meantime i'm going to form the second one just like i did the first with the remaining filling and olive oil okay the bobka are proofed i would say they're doubled in size they've mostly filled out like through the bottom of the pan and that's a good indicator i've done this and that's partly why i like pressed them down and flattened a little bit so that just helps you to determine how much they've grown and there again you have that spring back and i know i've repeated this many times but the spring back is an indication that there is like sufficient gas built up in the dough so when you put in the oven it's going to get super light and i have an oven preheated to 350 and these can bake side by side so you don't have to bake them one at a time so about two tablespoons of the reserved filling on top i did watch the seinfeld not like on purpose but it was just i've been watching a lot of seinfeld and i did watch the the bobcat episode which is also the black and white cookie episode great episode elaine's like it's the lesser bob cup no one likes cinnamon vodka not true not sure at all okay these they look great i'm gonna put them in the oven and these are gonna go for 40 to 45 minutes and i like to rotate them to make sure they're baking evenly in they go [Music] all right i am so excited to cut into the challah and try them especially the papka it smells so good so make sure that the breads have fully cooled you don't want to cut into bread while it's hot because you end up like allowing all of the steam to escape and it dries out the crumb so try to be patient and i'm going to demonstrate what the dough what the bread sounds like you can hear that sounds like kind of hollow and so that's how you know that you proofed it and baked it really well now traditionally holla is torn but i'm going to cut into it because i want you to see like a profile of the interior what the crumb looks like okay so this is what the crumb looks like it is super even it has a nice like golden color from the honey and the olive oil it's nice it's like if there's a silkiness to it that's kind of like the way that i like to describe the texture so i'm gonna actually just cut a slice and pull it apart and show you what that looks like it smells it's like really yeasty i get some of that olive oil and i love the way the texture just kind of like you can like pull out it's like string cheese you can like pull off strands of it little threads that to me is like the classic hollow texture i love eating it this way like little threads okay that is the plain classic holla i'm now gonna cut into the bobcat so i can show that to you i love how these turned out like i love the proportions the shape is so pleasing it's like this really cute little kind of squat loaf i love the texture of the crumble on top and i'm really excited to cut in and show you the spiral do wait for it to be fully cooled before you slice into it and use a bread knife i'm going to show you what that looks like can you see the steam because it's hot we did look it's after five we all got to go home so i did cut into it hot but try to let it cool look at the spiral it looks so good like i love the definition and it's that almond flour that gives you a really defined spiral but it's not we didn't have to add so much sugar to get there so this is like a really lightly sweet vodka that makes the best toast it's so good wow i love this application for holla you don't typically see holla or like a you know a style of dough like chala as the basis of vodka but it's really perfect because it's rich it's light and this is a dairy free version where you taste it and you would not know that it's dairy free at all it's so rich and delicious and the smell is like insane can i taste it that like silky quality of the crumb is really enhanced by that ribbon i love the little bit of texture from the almond flour this to me is like the best cinnamon toast but wrapped up in one package it's just so so delicious i mean this is really a recipe that you could make truly any time for any occasion it you don't even really need a reason but of course with the jewish new year coming up do give the raisins studded round a try and then once you get comfortable with the dough it's something you can make like all the time once a week if you want to and i really can't think of like a better recipe to kind of dip your toes in the baking pool than classic holla such a fun recipe to put together requires no equipment basically and a great way to like practice your six strand braid so thank you so much for watching and i'm very excited to bring you more episodes of try this at home [Music] you

Channel: NYT Cooking

Views: 768,412

Keywords: cooking, cooks, recipes, recipe, how-to, how to, kitchen, new york times, new york times cooking, nyt cooking, nyt, nytimes, babka, challah, claire saffitz, baking

Id: 1FcR1PDzC94

Length: 38min 29sec (2309 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 12 2022