Challah Bread

In honor of being called Jewish-looking by my mother, I decided to bake Challah bread. First of all Challah is pronounced hall-uh, or if your Gwen Stefani… Holla. (No, I do NOT like Gwen Stefani.) Challah bread is typically made for the Sabbath and/or Jewish Holidays. If you want more info click here (though it is Wikipedia, so believe what you will.)

Ahhhh yeast! Yes, it does scare me. Every time I think I’ve going to either kill it, or it’s somehow going to grow at an alarming rate and become a huge gob of dough and take over my oven and then eventually my house. A little paranoid? No…

Despite my paranoia with yeast I made Challah bread. Now, this is a lesson to those of you who don’t read through your recipes all the way before you make them. I usually do, but for some reason on this particular recipe I did not. So..alas, I ended up putting an extra egg. It was supposed to be 8 egg yolks in the dough and a whole egg to brush on top. You guessed it. I put 8 yolks and a whole egg in my dough. I don’t think it changed it too much though.

I was surprised at how fast it ended up baking though. I let it rise for an hour in an oiled bowl until it doubled in size. Then I braided it. I tried to figure out how you braid it with 6 instead of 3, but I couldn’t figure it out for life of me, and living in an Amish house with no internet I couldn’t Google it. So I ended up braiding it just normally with 3. Then the recipe said to let it rise for another hour until doubled in size. But, it doubled in size in 20 minutes. So I ended baking it a lot sooner than I anticipated. I brushed another whole egg on top and put it in the oven. This also said that it would take 50-60 minutes. It was very dark brown at 40 minutes though. I was actually really lucky that I checked on it, because otherwise I would have had a very black loaf of Challah bread. Fortunately I did check it just in time. J

The thing that sucked the most though was that it stuck to my pan horribly. Even though I greased the whole pan and supposedly it is non-stick. So I lost almost the entire bottom of my loaf, but it was still good. It makes most excellent French toast. J