Round Challah for the New Year

Last weekend was Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year. To celebrate, I made challah, a traditional Jewish bread. I have always intended to learn how to make challah, but it always seemed beyond my reach as a baker. Partially because I am not a very good bread baker, but mostly because the recipes I have seen take up more room than they should in the cookbook. Since we had nothing else going on, I decided I would give it a whirl, and if I was going to go through the effort to make the challah, we might as well celebrate in style with a whole shabbat dinner, candles and all!

We had apples and honey as an appletizer, (hah! Appletizer is an apple juice like soda that we had in South Africa. Seth loved it and always laments its non-existence in US grocery stores. So I say it a lot to remind him how unfortunate he is.) challah dipped in honey to start (for a sweet new year!) chicken soup, apple and sweet potato latkes as a main course. We didn't need dessert. We were so stuffed! Normally latkes are served during Chanukah, but you know, they are tastey, and they don't take five hours to bake like some of the Rosh Hashannah sweet potato recipes I found. So I made them. Plus Seth said since I'm not Jewish I don't have to follow the rules. (ha ha ha ha ha)

Anyway, back to the challah. What an adventure! The recipe calls for 5 pounds of flour. Seriously?! Is that necessary? Five POUNDS?!?! I read through the entire recipe, and noticed at the end that this recipe was for 5-7 loaves! Well, I didn't actually need that much, but none of the other ingredient ratios were easily halved, quartered, or even cut into thirds! (I know I'm bad at math, but even if I could have done the math I would have had no way of measuring these ratios!)

So, I decided to make the whole 5 pound recipe.

I went to the store to see about getting five pounds of flour. Wow! Lucky me! I never noticed that they come in five pound bags before! WOW! There is a TWENTY-FIVE pound bag!! I NEED that one. So I got it. It didn't occur to me until I got home with my twenty-five pound bag of flour that I don't have a scale, so I have no way of extracting five pounds out of my twenty-five pound bag. Oooooh Joanna. This is why you don't make nice things like challah.

I looked up pound to cup ratios for flour online, and I got varied results. Apparently the stuff weighs different amounts depending on humidity, flour type, grain size, and all SORTS of different things. So, I decided to use the smallest conversion, figuring I could add more flour if it was too wet. Somehow, (I can not duplicate my thinking here, and now it doesn't make sense) I deduced a number of cups to use, and then realized I only had enough bowl space for half of that! So, even after I bought my 25 pound bag of flour, I was going to have to cut the recipe in half! Oy-veh! 1.5 eggs was hard to create!

Eventually, after a lot of thinking back to basic algebra and fraction multiplication and division, I got all the ingredients together and started mixing. Have I mentioned that math is not my strong suit? When Seth got home, I had him check my fraction divisions, and apparently I have mad skillz and all my numbers were correct! Whew! That's never happened before! It was a Rosh Hashannah miracle!

Seth and I spent a long time pounding and kneading the dough. It was hard. The recipe called for high gluten flour, which of course I couldn't find, so someone at the store suggested adding gluten to regular flour. Did you know that gluten makes dough really hard to knead? I didn't, but I guess it makes sense, since it makes the bread more dense.

I found directions on line how to braid them to be round, for the new year! So we had two round challah, and one is still in the freezer, waiting to be baked for break fast on Monday evening. The round challah brebaked:

Seth bought these dried flowers for me at a farmer's market (or, for the less romantic telling, I asked Seth for money to buy these flowers at a farmer's market). They will last a long time without dying and looking ugly! These candle holders were Seth's grandmother's. When Seth's dad gave them to us, I bought some Shabbat candles, and this is the first time we've used any. I'm glad we at least got to use some of them! The table cloth is from Africa. I haggled for it. It was a good lesson.

When the challah came out of the oven, Seth had the first bite. Seth loves challah, and apparently, I make a fine one. A huge smile spread across his face, and he said "This is really good!"  I guess I am not so bad at baking bread as I thought!