the davidsonienne •

When I gave my beau a copy of The Bread Bible, I thought he would like it, but I certainly had no idea that he would practically open up a bakery.  Much to my delight, we embarked upon a challah journey when he came to visit last weekend.  Neither of us is Jewish, so this recipe is not emblazoned on our hearts since birth, and all of our (my?) experience with challah loaves comes from purchased goods.  The result is pictured below.  See Figure 2: “The product of my weekend.”

How pretty!  Yes, perhaps you think so.  We did, too.  However, our challah loaf went through a bit of an identity crisis in the oven, or perhaps, more accurately, in its early stages of growth.  It sure looks like a challah loaf - but inside… it’s like a dense forest of gluten.  We were confused.  This tastes okay!… we thought… but where are the fluffy, doughy tendrils of eggyness?  Here’s how we did it, but you should probably consult the expert (book) when you make yours.

Having only baked beer and pumpkin loaves in the past, I’m a bread novice.  So it was fun to make a sponge and see what happens when you let it hang out in a bowl for a few hours.  The sponge is made of some flour, yeast, two raw eggs - ours were chilly when they should have been room temperature (the first mistake!) - some honey, water, and a little corn oil.  You slosh that around a bit.  Then top it off with nearly 6 cups of flour mixed with close to half the packet of instant yeast (forgive the crude measurements - he has the book and I didn’t bother to write it all down), wisked, then mixed with salt.  Salt deactivates yeast, so you want to mix the yeast with the dough well before salting.   So basically you have one layer of wet stuff swimming around under another layer of dry stuff.  And, after a few hours (we used four of them), you have earthquake!  See Figure 1.

Earthquakes do not look like bread or like dough, so you plop them into a mixer or kitchenaide to spin them around and make them tacky.  Tacky means sticky to bread peoples.  This fact might be fun to use when applied to unfortunate fashion choices or that theme party that you never/always went to wearing a choice lime green spandex unitard or perhaps your fuschia suit with black bow tie.  Now here was our next mistake (not the clothing!).  The DOUGH HOOK.  Rather, the dough hook which we did not use.  The dough hook is a hook a la Peter Pan’s nemesis but instead of scratching the feathers of ye olde parroty companion, it whips dough around for you so you don’t have to knead it.  Since I am a novice, as stated in my earlier disclaimer, I thought the dough hook was the plastic thingie with a hole in it, considering “hook” to be more of a metaphor… okay, I don’t know what I was thinking.  We don’t even have a dough hook.  What am I supposed to use then?  But the moral of the story is - kneading keeps your tender, easily startled, bread in shape, as opposed to beating it, which rips it and destroys all fabric of confidence it had, turning it into a rock in the oven.  Maybe not exactly a rock, but a loaf with some pounds to lose, at least.   

We plopped our poor confused challah dough from the mixer into a bowl to watch it rise.  Which it did not do so well, because of the mauling it had just gone through.  My condolences, dear thing.  But it did rise a little bit, after two hours.  Then you plop it down and make a business letter fold, which is so much cuter to do to a lump of dough than to an actual letter, and you let it hang out some more in a bowl.  After a while you take it out and slice it into three parts for the braiding.  So since I’m the sous chef and the female, I’m all, “I know how to braid, it’s easy, just like dressing up Barbie last week in second grade.”  False.  Rose Levy says to start braiding in the middle.  Uh oh.  It took a few attempts, outcries of exasperation, and threats to bake it as three ugly breadsticks, but we finally figured out how to make the thick braid pictured below.  Thank goodness there was a picture to mimic.  We painted on an egg wash, and then baked it.  It emerged from its foil tent at the end victorious… but with a thud.  And a burny bottom.  But consider this my warm-up loaf.  Next time, my faithful readers.  Next time you will wish you were in my kitchen, stuffing fistfuls of fresh challah into your face.    

And as I sit here eating the last stale bits of it, all I can do is plot the next chapter of my attempts.  A new recipe or a second chance?  To be continued…