Central Europe · Volume 21, Rye, Smoke and the Kitchen Beside It

Challah

Name: Challah
Total time: 4 h
Yield: Makes 1 large loaf
Cuisine: Poland
Ingredients: 500 g strong white flour; 7 g dried yeast; 60 g sugar; 2 eggs, plus 1 for glaze; 60 ml oil; 250 ml warm water; 1.5 tsp (10 g) salt

Ashkenazi, pre-1939 Poland

Challah, a braided egg bread: a tall, six strand braided loaf with a deep mahogany gold glazed crust, a scatter of poppy seed across the top, one end torn away to show a soft.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 4 hours

Researched: 10 sources cited
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Ashkenazi, pre-1939 Poland. The braided form dated to fifteenth-century Austria and southern Germany, adopted from non-Jewish neighbours who braided their own Sunday loaves.

by Ashkenazi, pre-1939 Poland

A large share of what the world now calls Jewish deli food is specifically an American reinvention, one or two steps removed from anything traceable to Poland, and the distinction is worth making explicit rather than glossed over, because this chapter is specifically about the Polish original, not the American afterlife. Rugelach's rolled-pastry technique genuinely originates in Poland, Hungary and Galicia, but the cream-cheese-dough cookie sold under that name today is dated to Newark's Third Ward Jewish bakeries by 1939, made possible by industrial American cream cheese production that did not exist in the old country. Babka genuinely originates in Poland and Ukraine in the early 1800s, rolled with cinnamon or fruit alongside challah dough, but remained essentially unknown outside Eastern Europe until the 1950s, when Israeli and American bakeries began producing it at scale. Bagels are genuinely Polish in first documented reference, covered in full below, but the boiled-then-baked commercial bagel that now dominates the world is itself a later American development. None of this makes the American versions fake. It does mean this chapter should not, and will not, present them as unbroken continuations of the pre-1939 original.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Makes 1 large loaf. About 4 hours including proving.

Ingredients

500 g strong white flour
7 g dried yeast
60 g sugar
2 eggs, plus 1 for glaze
60 ml oil
250 ml warm water
1.5 tsp (10 g) salt

Method

Combine flour, yeast, sugar and salt. Add the eggs, oil and warm water, and knead to a smooth, elastic dough, 10 minutes.
Prove, covered, until doubled, roughly 1.5 hours.
Before shaping, separate a small piece of dough for hafrashat challah, the traditional ritual acknowledgement of the offering this practice descends from, if the baker wishes to observe it; the dough is traditionally burned rather than baked.
Divide the remaining dough into strands and braid. Prove again, 45 minutes.
Glaze with beaten egg. Bake at 190°C, 25 to 30 minutes, until deep golden and hollow-sounding when tapped.

What a modern chef changes

A slower, cooler prove for a more open, more flavourful crumb

Method

Retard the first prove overnight in the fridge rather than pushing it through in ninety minutes at room temperature, giving the yeast far longer to develop real flavour, a technique borrowed directly from modern bread baking generally and entirely compatible with the dough's own traditional enrichment.
Enrich with a small proportion of schmaltz alongside the traditional oil, a genuine, honestly-flagged crossover choice this chapter offers rather than asserts as traditional, giving a savoury undertone against the loaf's sweetness that some bakers within the tradition itself already use.
Braid a six-strand loaf rather than the simpler three, for a taller, more defined crumb structure and a more dramatic crust surface for the glaze to catch on, a purely technical, honestly-named departure from the plainer form, offered as a variation rather than a correction.

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