Rosh Hashanah Test Kitchen: Pumpkin Challah

Make sure to read the updated version of Pumpkin Challah here! 

We've actually made pumpkin challah before, though I've never blogged about it because we hadn't quite finalized the recipe. I'm in a fall mood with cool, tights-wearing weather, spicy foods, and the first of the early turning leaves. This past Friday, I had no commitments, so what better than a Rosh Hashanah Test Kitchen. Three families (plus us!) were the lucky winners of "Take some of my challah off my hands!

And now, I bring you Pumpkin Challah. I'm thinking this more of a Sukkot food, but heck, it seems great for Rosh Hashanah as well, especially with squash soups and herby chicken.

3/4 c water
2 1/2 tsp active dry yeast
1 1/2 tbsp honey
1/4 c vegetable oil
3/4 c canned pumpkin
3-4 c flour
1 1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon* *see note in recipe
pinch cloves
pinch nutmeg
(make sure you check the updated ingredient list!)

Mix water together with yeast and honey. Allow to rest for around 10 minutes or until yeast creates little eruptions. Add oil and pumpkin to yeast mixture and stir gently. Add flour and spices. (Note: Honestly, this challah was great, but I think it could stand a bit more sweetness. My friends who reviewed the loaves liked it, but they added jam on Shabbat morning. If you're planning on eating it plain, I would double the cinnamon content or perhaps add more honey/sugar. Knead by hand or with a stand mixer. Let dough rest in an oiled bowl until doubled in bulk


Punch down. Braid and let rest for additional half hour. Egg wash (I sprinkled a little cinnamon sugar on with the egg wash). This recipe yielded two smallish 5-strand braids and one round braid. (I'll post a how-to on the round braid next week.)

Bake at 350 for around 30 minutes or until internal temperature reaches 180-200 degrees.

Midweek Loaf: Olive Oil Bread

It's times like these that I realize how lucky I am to have a huge kitchen, a nice oven, and husband who doesn't mind that I cut into a fresh loaf of bread before he came home.  Yeah, I couldn't wait.


Olive Oil bread was inspired by a recipe in my favorite book, Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook.  However, the recipe calls for fresh yeast, which I didn't have (it's been out at the store the last few weeks... boo hoo), and I wanted to make a slightly smaller loaf.  In the end, that didn't happen because the heavy dough was so oily, I kept adding flour and ended up close to Martha's proportions.  But here's the proportions I used.

2 tsp active dry yeast
1 tbsp honey
1 c warm (but not boiling) water
2/3 c extra virgin olive oil (I used Trader Joe's because it's what we had on hand)
about 4 cups of flour (I used 2 c unbleached all-purpose and 2 c bread flour)
2 tsp sea salt
cornmeal, for dusting


Mix the yeast, water, and honey together and let rest until foamy, about 10 minutes.  Add the oil, flour, and salt and mix well by hand or with a stand mixer.  Let rest until dough has doubled in bulk (for me, it was about 2 hours).

Form into a boule on baking sheet or wooden peel sprinkled with corn meal (I sort of winged it, but I wish I'd look this up beforehand).  Sprinkle entire boule with cornmeal.  Let rest an additional 30 minutes.  Meanwhile, place pizza/baking stone in oven and preheat to 450.  Score top of boule is square shaped pattern.  Transfer to stone and bake 35-40 minutes.


I'm so in love with this bread. It's very crusty but totally moist inside.  It doesn't even need topping like butter or olive oil, obviously because it's so delicious inside.  And, I'm loving the baking stone method.  The crust is so nice.  Tastes like real bread :) From a store!

Eggs, Eggs, Everywhere... but not a drop in THIS challah!

This past Shabbat, we had a small group of 6 adults and 1 child.  I got into my head that it would be awesome to make the flourless chocolate cake we love so much from Pesach it shouldn't be relegated to one week a year.  6 eggs.  Carrot Kugel, another egg.  The Hazz asked for Matzo Ball soup since we have fresh garden basil.  4 more eggs.  A half batch of challah.  2 eggs plus 1 for the egg wash.  Are you with me, that's 15 eggs.  I just COULDN'T BRING MYSELF to crack two more into the second batch of challah.  (I actually also altered the chicken recipe and found an olive oil instead of egg method for getting bread crumbs to stick to chicken.)

In April, I made an eggless challah for a friend who is vegan.  At the time, I wasn't sure if she ate honey, so I opted for sugar to proof the yeast.  But, really, I don't like sugar-sweetened challot.  I find they always fall a little flat, don't have the luxurious texture I'd like my challah to have.  So, here's what we did on this eggless version.

3/4 c water plus about 1/4 c more
2 tsp active dry yeast
1 1/2 tbsp honey
1/4 c vegetable oil
3 c flour
1 1/4 tsp salt
small amount of (real) maple syrup for wash

It's essentially the same as my regular half-batch, but I added the extra water (around 1/4 c) while mixing.  Then it was too sticky, so I sprinkled more flour.  Wash, rinse, repeat, until the texture I wanted.  As with the other eggless challah, I used MAPLE SYRUP for the glaze and it's SO TASTY.

We didn't have any fresh yeast on hand this week (all the stuff at the grocery store was expired boo hoo!), so we were back to active dry but it worked well for us.  I needed a slower rise anyway on Friday afternoon due to what-was-going-in-the-oven-when and fresh yeast rises OH SO FAST.

Egg-y on the left, Egg-less on the right!

Eggless challah is so different from regular challah.  It's MUCH lighter... in both color and texture.  The flavor seems less sweet, even though it's the same amount of honey.  It's a good alternative and  also seems to last a little bit better (for noshing on Sunday mornings!).

Shavua Tov, chaverim!  I hope you have a great week!

View of Shabbat - August 19

I'm running late (haven't showered yet, haven't set the lights, blah blah), so I promise to make a REAL post later this weekend... I already have a great title for it. But, here's a teaser for you.


Shabbat Shalom from our bayit to yours!

Midweek Loaf: Martha Stewart's Honey Whole Wheat Bread

If you're a follower of The Mrs.'s personal blog (it's not really all that interesting... so I'm not hurt if you're not), you'll know that she recently left her day job in pursuit of a few other exciting work opportunities and to begin work on my PhD in musicology.  On the home front, this is going to result in either amazing healthy eating or complete gluttony.  This week, we've enjoyed margherita pizza, zucchini chocolate chip muffins, and Martha Stewart's Honey Whole Wheat Bread.  I actually followed the recipe out of Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook, however, the linked version is just about the same.

Since we're just a family of two, I halved all the ingredients.  I know the purists out there will tell me I should have dragged out my kitchen scale and weighed for more accuracy (the Baking Handbook uses both weights and cup measures), but I was being lazy.

My favorite thing about this recipe was making the flour well.  It was a nice method, but to be honest, I'm not really sure what the purpose of it is.

I'm still not sure I have the crust quite right.  I'd like to try doing steam baths and water washes in the oven, but I don't know if my oven can be that fancy.  Since I'm not a big fan of whole wheat challah, but I am a fan of wheat bread, I'm hoping this will make the challah a lot special on Shabbat.

Do YOU save white flour for Shabbat?  Have any go-to non-challah breads or baked goods?

Hippy Dippy Flax Seed Bread

So, yesterday, I stood in the baking aisle of one of my favorite grocery stores for a good 10 minutes. It's not exactly the biggest grocery store in town, and I think I may have started to weird out the guy shelving the pasta sauce. After reading all the labels, I decided on a hippy dippy bag of flax seeds. Flax seeds are high in omega-3 and fiber!  Yay!  Thus, I present to you, a three-seed bread, dubbed Hippy Dippy Flax Seed Bread. Enjoy!

This is a modification of the recipe I found on the bag of Bob's Red Mill Flax Seed. So, I'm not taking credit. I modified it though, so here's my method.

1 c water
2 tsp active dry yeast
2 tbsp honey
3 tbsp vegetable oil
3 c flour (I used 1 c wheat and 2 c white bread flour)
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/3 c flax seeds
1 tbsp poppy seeds
2 tbsp sunflower kernels

Mix yeast and honey in very hot (but not boiling) water.  Allow to rest up to 10 minutes or until yeast proofs and you see little "eruptions."  Meanwhile mix together all dry ingredients.  After yeast is proofed, add oil and mix with wooden spoon.  Add dry ingredients and mix by hand or with a dough hook on a Kitchen Aid.  I usually use the dough hook until a ball forms and then throw it on the counter (literally, I toss it) and knead a bit by hand.

This dough rose REALLY fast.  I left for lunch with my mom and returned in an hour and a half and it had basically grown out of the bowl.  I'm not sure if that's just because it's very warm outside or not.  I actually punched down and allowed dough to rise again.  I almost never do this because I'm not convinced it does much.  But, I didn't feel like baking the loaves quite yet.

I think you could probably braid this bread, but I decided just to form it into a loaf and slash it right before putting it in the oven.  Bake at 350 for 30 to 35 minutes or until internal temperature reaches 180 degrees.  I'm still loving the pizza stone baking method, so it was a tight squeeze in the oven with our regular challah as well.  Worth it.

So, I dunno.  Is it a challah?  Is it just a tasty bread?  (I tried a little roll of it before Shabbat... it's DELICIOUS!)   The Hazz just walked in from the JCC and said, "THIS LOOKS LIKE A PROFESSIONAL BREAD!"  I know he's my husband, so I'm taking it with a grain of salt, but awwwwwww :)

Enjoy it with all your hippy dippy side dishes like beans and tofu and mixed greens.  Peace out!

 

Look at this bounty!!! Today, I also experimented with fresh yeast. I'll update you all after I try the "regular challah" (challah is never regular!).

Shout-Out: Jalapeno Jallah

When The Jazz and I were in Costa Rica for our luna de miel, we hung out with some of the Jewish community. It was a lovely experience. One of the things we really enjoyed was the transliteration of the gutteral Hebrew sound as "j." This creates many transliterations like "shajarit," "minja," and "jazzan." So I present to you, Jalapeno Jallah.

I take NO credit what-so-ever for this recipe. I stole it from Leigh Ann, the Frugal Ima, A Frugal Ima Super-Frugal Recipe: Jalapeno Bread. Since we're having dairy Shabbat, I used shredded cheddar. I added a few TBSP of oil because I couldn't get it to stick together.  This week's braid is a four-strander that I found on youtube because I couldn't remember how I normally do this.  (This happens to me almost every week.  I like five-braids and six-braids.  But when I want to do a four-braid, I can never remember how to do it.)  I actually forgot to egg-wash it. But I don't think it needs it. It's quite lovely.

Other things on the menu include mango, blueberry, peach salad, mexican vegetarian lasagna (my own mixture of things), guacamole, and strawberry ice cream. The Jazz will also sample this week's major win, Banana Chocolate Chip Jallah. Not the healthiest Shabbat ever, but you only live once, right?

Eggless Challah

This week, we're having dairy Shabbat and guests.  Several are vegetarian and one is vegan.  So, what better time to try out an eggless challah.  I'm making one with egg and one without.

Here's the egg-less ingredient list...

3 C flour
1/4 cup plus 1/4 tsp sugar
1/4 C natural oil (vegetable or canola)
1 1/4 C Water
1/2 tsp salt
2 1/4 tsp (1 packet) to 1 Tbsp dry yeast
Optional: Maple Syrup for an egg-free shine

Place warm water in mixing bowl.  Add yeast and 1/4 tsp sugar, mixing gently.  Let yeast proof for about 10 minutes.

Add vegetable oil and mix with wood spoon.   Add flour, sugar, and salt and beat with dough hook on a stand mixer or knead by hand.

If the dough is not holding together as a ball, add a bit more oil or water.  If the dough is very sticky, add more flour.  Turn the ball out onto a floured work surface and punch a few times until very smooth.

Place in oiled bowl and cover in plastic wrap or a towel.  Allow to rise at least one hour, preferrably more, until dough has doubled in size.

Punch down the ball in the bowl and remove.  Punch out all air bubbles.  Braid in your preferred method.  Allow to rise 20-30 minutes.  Eggless Wash: I just used maple syrup.  I read it somewhere online, and it works really well.  I totally recommend it if you run out of eggs and just need a shine.  It's not too sweet at all!

Bake at 350 for 25-30 minutes.  (You can read about my oven temperature methods here.)

Enjoy!  Do YOU have a preferred method for eggless challah?  I'd love to hear your thoughts!  This challah is a bit on the lighter, fluffier side.