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livredorIn which I try a traditional Ashkenazi recipe.
This started as a bit of an elaborate joke; the satirical persona "JewWhoHasItAll" who posts from an alternate reality 'Medinat America' where Judaism is the dominant religion in the USA started a thread around the idea that some Christians celebrate the 1st January as the commemoration of Jesus' circumcision, and explaining to the mirror universe Jewish audience how this differs from a Jewish celebration of a regular baby's circumcision, a bris. Anyway they mentioned that it isn't traditional to bring babka to your Christian friends' new year celebrations. And my partner who is the kind of Christian who does in fact regard 1 January as the feast of Jesus' circumcision said that in her opinion babka would be great. I somewhat foolishly agreed to try my hand at making some.
Now I don't actually have a handed down family recipe for this, because the part of my family who are Ashkenazi are also people who aren't very much into cooking. I had a vague idea that babka is somewhat like challah, the traditional rich bread made for Shabbat and festivals, only more so. Internet research and asking friends suggested that in fact many people do make "babka" by simply adding chocolate spread to challah. But if I'm going to go for joke baking I'm going to do it properly, damnit. So I sneakily snapped a picture of the recipe from the classic Joan Nathan cookbook Jewish Holiday Cooking, while it was sitting in the to-be-wrapped pile of Christmas presents.
Because JHC was updated in 2004 from a book originally published in the 70s in America, it somewhat assumes that every kitchen has a near-industrial food processor and stand mixer. I do not. I have a little hand blender and muscles much weaker than those of my ancestors who made this kind of food by hand for large families probably while getting strong by carrying the youngest children around. But I had determined I was going to do this, and because it was the days leading up to the new year I had time for serious baking. I was undeterred.
The first phase is make a standard yeast dough starter. The recipe said dissolve yeast in warm water; I added a spoonful of sugar because my experience of yeast is that it doesn't get going spontaneously in plain water. Add flour, mix to make dough, leave to rise for an hour. So far this is broadly similar to making bread. Next came a stage broadly similar to making sponge cake, cream butter and sugar, then mix with both the yeast dough and additional flour. This is the bit that was hard work to accomplish manually! But I conquered it in the end and ended up with an extra rich, buttery dough. The dough rests in the fridge overnight, cool cool.
Then came the awkward bit: you're supposed to spread the dough with filling, roll it up like what Nathan calls a jelly roll and I would call a Swiss roll, and then twist the filled roll and seal the ends. I made Nathan's suggested filling because that was something I could manage with my little hand blender, but it really is very odd and I am not convinced superior to just using Nutella like my friends do. Basically it contains melted butter, apricot jam, crumbs of leftover cake (conveniently we had a couple of slices of chocolate cake left from Christmas), ground almonds and grated cooking chocolate. (Nathan says, use imported if you can, American chocolate is bad quality, LOL.)
But the dough was in no way solid enough to shape like the instructions suggested. I could just about manage rolling it out, but as soon as I tried to fold it over the filling it fell apart, and it was rather too sticky to handle well. For my second loaf I managed to roll in enough flour to give it at least some integrity, so that was a bit better. I don't know if the problem was inadequate mixing on day 1, or if an experienced baker would be more skilled at shaping very sticky wet dough.
I did not bother making streusel to sprinkle the babka, partly because the filling had all spilled out of my clumsily twisted rolls and partly because I had run out of can after the struggle with rolling the dough round the filling. I also did not bother putting the falling apart cakes into loaf or bundt tins because I reckoned I could just rise and bake them on baking trays, which did seem to work ok. I don't quite know why Nathan suggests making one single and one double babka, but I just made three small ones. They rose quite nicely in the final prove, then I cooked them for just a shade too long (partly because I knocked over a cup of tea when I was about to go and get them out of the oven and had to clear that up first).
So on the plus side my first attempt at babka dough has a lovely crumb and is buttery and rich, it really is like a cross between challah and cake in the best possible way. On the negative side my inadequate rolling and twisting meant that the filling was basically all in a blob in the middle rather than marbled through the dough, and some of the filling that spilled out was a bit overcooked. If I do this again, and it is probably going to have to be during the secular holidays because it needs more or less two consecutive half days worth of attention, I will not bother with the weird filling but just use hazelnut chocolate spread. And I think I will add a little more flour to the initial half cake, half bread dough. I probably won't bother with Joan Nathan again; the recipe was well written, but between assuming equipment I don't have, measuring everything in annoying American units like cups and sticks, and what appeared to be needlessly overcomplicating things, I think I can find a simpler alternative.
This started as a bit of an elaborate joke; the satirical persona "JewWhoHasItAll" who posts from an alternate reality 'Medinat America' where Judaism is the dominant religion in the USA started a thread around the idea that some Christians celebrate the 1st January as the commemoration of Jesus' circumcision, and explaining to the mirror universe Jewish audience how this differs from a Jewish celebration of a regular baby's circumcision, a bris. Anyway they mentioned that it isn't traditional to bring babka to your Christian friends' new year celebrations. And my partner who is the kind of Christian who does in fact regard 1 January as the feast of Jesus' circumcision said that in her opinion babka would be great. I somewhat foolishly agreed to try my hand at making some.
Now I don't actually have a handed down family recipe for this, because the part of my family who are Ashkenazi are also people who aren't very much into cooking. I had a vague idea that babka is somewhat like challah, the traditional rich bread made for Shabbat and festivals, only more so. Internet research and asking friends suggested that in fact many people do make "babka" by simply adding chocolate spread to challah. But if I'm going to go for joke baking I'm going to do it properly, damnit. So I sneakily snapped a picture of the recipe from the classic Joan Nathan cookbook Jewish Holiday Cooking, while it was sitting in the to-be-wrapped pile of Christmas presents.
Because JHC was updated in 2004 from a book originally published in the 70s in America, it somewhat assumes that every kitchen has a near-industrial food processor and stand mixer. I do not. I have a little hand blender and muscles much weaker than those of my ancestors who made this kind of food by hand for large families probably while getting strong by carrying the youngest children around. But I had determined I was going to do this, and because it was the days leading up to the new year I had time for serious baking. I was undeterred.
The first phase is make a standard yeast dough starter. The recipe said dissolve yeast in warm water; I added a spoonful of sugar because my experience of yeast is that it doesn't get going spontaneously in plain water. Add flour, mix to make dough, leave to rise for an hour. So far this is broadly similar to making bread. Next came a stage broadly similar to making sponge cake, cream butter and sugar, then mix with both the yeast dough and additional flour. This is the bit that was hard work to accomplish manually! But I conquered it in the end and ended up with an extra rich, buttery dough. The dough rests in the fridge overnight, cool cool.
Then came the awkward bit: you're supposed to spread the dough with filling, roll it up like what Nathan calls a jelly roll and I would call a Swiss roll, and then twist the filled roll and seal the ends. I made Nathan's suggested filling because that was something I could manage with my little hand blender, but it really is very odd and I am not convinced superior to just using Nutella like my friends do. Basically it contains melted butter, apricot jam, crumbs of leftover cake (conveniently we had a couple of slices of chocolate cake left from Christmas), ground almonds and grated cooking chocolate. (Nathan says, use imported if you can, American chocolate is bad quality, LOL.)
But the dough was in no way solid enough to shape like the instructions suggested. I could just about manage rolling it out, but as soon as I tried to fold it over the filling it fell apart, and it was rather too sticky to handle well. For my second loaf I managed to roll in enough flour to give it at least some integrity, so that was a bit better. I don't know if the problem was inadequate mixing on day 1, or if an experienced baker would be more skilled at shaping very sticky wet dough.
I did not bother making streusel to sprinkle the babka, partly because the filling had all spilled out of my clumsily twisted rolls and partly because I had run out of can after the struggle with rolling the dough round the filling. I also did not bother putting the falling apart cakes into loaf or bundt tins because I reckoned I could just rise and bake them on baking trays, which did seem to work ok. I don't quite know why Nathan suggests making one single and one double babka, but I just made three small ones. They rose quite nicely in the final prove, then I cooked them for just a shade too long (partly because I knocked over a cup of tea when I was about to go and get them out of the oven and had to clear that up first).
So on the plus side my first attempt at babka dough has a lovely crumb and is buttery and rich, it really is like a cross between challah and cake in the best possible way. On the negative side my inadequate rolling and twisting meant that the filling was basically all in a blob in the middle rather than marbled through the dough, and some of the filling that spilled out was a bit overcooked. If I do this again, and it is probably going to have to be during the secular holidays because it needs more or less two consecutive half days worth of attention, I will not bother with the weird filling but just use hazelnut chocolate spread. And I think I will add a little more flour to the initial half cake, half bread dough. I probably won't bother with Joan Nathan again; the recipe was well written, but between assuming equipment I don't have, measuring everything in annoying American units like cups and sticks, and what appeared to be needlessly overcomplicating things, I think I can find a simpler alternative.
