Challah

Baking challah. If you are a traditional Jewish girl this is a skill demonstrated and taught to you in the same way that a baby is given its first inoculation. It's a non negotiable requirement of growing up in tradition. Various bewigged orthodox women attempted at various stages in my early adolescence to impart this skill to me but I wasn't interested. I was in fact entirely detached from any idea that I was going to do Girl Stuff in my adulthood. At that stage I was climbing trees after school - I mean, literally - with my mates who went to the local comp, something that would have had most of my religious teachers swooning with outrage. So for years I lacked the skill. When I began baking it was all about cakes, but a few years back I got into Bread. At this stage in my baking development, I will regularly turn out a sourdough (yup, I have starter brewing by my kitchen window day in day out - more on that in another post); bread made from potato peelings and bread made with the juice of dill cucumbers; a walnut and honey loaf, my family's fave Sunday breakfast treat, and of course I bang out a soda bread in minutes after a day at work if the house feels like a bread smell would cheer everyone up. Which it does, every time. But challah. There is something really, really special about baking challah. For a start, a bit like sourdough, it's not easy. I don't care what anyone says, there is serious skill involved in ensuring your challah dough rises, that it has the right honey to salt ratio, that it comes out light and fluffy but solid all the same...it's taken me several flat pancakes of challah attempts to get even close to right, but oh boy, when you get there, for any bread baker it's like Olympic gold. Recently I discovered the tiny spare attic bedroom at the top of the house was really nice and warm. You know, like PROVING DRAWER warm. The perfect temperature. It was my baking epiphany. Once I'd made my dough (and oh, one other thing: if you want the yeast to do its job the water you use has to be warm, not lukewarm, but not hot, because too much heat kills the yeast), I would cover it with a damp cloth, carry it up to my warm room and leave it there for at least 2 hours. Longer, in fact, than any recipe called for. Then I would carry it back down to the kitchen, punch it down, separate it into two doughs,  take each lump and make three thick strands out of each, plait them...and carry them back up to the attic. Much later, after egg wash and sesame seeds, time to go into the oven, from where it fills not just the house but the entire STREET with the smell of awesomeness. And if you calculate the amount of time and bother it would have taken me to produce the thing, you would get why the majority of people who go to such lengths are orthodox Jewish women whose major function in life is to turn out perfect Friday night food for hundreds, including challah loaves. I mean, if you have a job, or indeed a life, how do you fit in the perfect challah? Well I do work full time, in a  busy job with long hours, and I am telling you that this is a loaf worth taking a day off to deliver. This is a bread to turn road rage into campfire community love. And no, I don't just make it on a Friday. Why wait till the weekend??