Sourdough Challah
Rich, eggy, moist and now a tiny bit sour. Living in NYC means my starter is not aggressively sour, but you can taste it over the rich flavor of this traditional Challah bread. Recipe adapted from The Jewish Cookbook.
I tend to make all of my sourdough breads with a large amount of starter as I know no moderation and often feed too much starter. See the notes for how to scale down the starter needed for this recipe.
Ingredients:
480 grams of active starter, at 100% hydration (equal parts water, flour & starter)
390 grams of Bread Flour
100 grams of sugar
1.5 teaspoons of salt
75 mL or 1/3 cup of neutral oil
3 eggs - reserve one for the egg-wash
Tools:
Loaf pan, springform pan, or if you are ambitious, a baking tray
Parchment baking paper
Stand Mixer is optional but helpful
Steps:
In a large bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer, combine the dry ingredients.
Add in the starter, just 2 of the eggs, and the oil, and knead until soft and elastic. If kneading by hand, you may wish to pile your dry ingredients and make a well in the center with the starter, oil and egg mixed together, then slowly incorporate the flour.
You may need to add water if the dough is too dry, or more flour if it is too wet. The dough should be easy to handle after at least 10 minutes of hand kneaded (or about half that in a mixer.)
The dough now needs to rise until it is about doubled in size in a well oiled and tightly covered bowl. If you want to bake it the same day, you will need at least 2 hours up to maybe 4 hours in a warm place, depending on the strength of your starter. You can also leave the dough in the fridge overnight, and finish the rise if needed in a warm place the next day.
Shape the dough. You could get fancy and braid the dough, splitting it into a number of equal parts then rolling these parts into long strands, braiding the strands together, then either tucking the ends under or connecting them together to make a wreath shape. I was never good at braiding, so I often just use a loaf pan to hide my sins.
Take your remaining egg and whisk it in a small bowl. Brush the bread down with the egg and hold onto the remaining egg.
Preheat your oven to 375 F (190 C). Cover the dough loosely with greased plastic wrap and let it sit for at least 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes and your oven being up to temperature, brush the dough down with egg again. This dual egg wash process will give your Challah the characteristic dark brown crust. If desired, you could sprinkle the dough with sesame or poppy seeds. Both are very traditional.
Bake the bread in the middle of your oven until the internal temperature reaches 195 F (90 C) and the outside is a deep brown. Cool on a rack for at least 15 minutes before serving.
Notes
100% hydration starter is fed so that the ratio of flour, water and starter is all equal. To get around 480 grams of active starter, you would then feed 160 grams of the starter an additional 160 grams of flour and 160 grams of water. You will probably lose some to various surfaces and I would go a few grams higher on each.
As I said in the header, I use far too much starter most of the time because I tend to over-activate ZomBob Jr., my fridge-caged starter. To scale down the starter in this, or any other recipe of mine, use the following steps. You can also use them in reverse to scale up the starter in any recipe where the liquid used is mostly water and the starter hydration is 100%. Removing milk or other liquids with your starter could impact both flavor and texture.
The key to the whole process is to remember that your 100% hydration starter is about 50% water and 50% flour, so you can split that in half and add or subtract an equal amount of both from the recipe. You can also use the same math to remove the starter entirely. Just add back in the right amount of water and flour, and then a packet of yeast.
Take the total amount of starter in the recipe and split it in half. In this case, 480 divided by 2 is 240.
Decide how much starter you want to use. I would suggest at least 125 grams for an enriched dough (meaning one with eggs or oil added, rather than just flour, water, salt and raising agent) and split that in half. This would give you around 63 grams if using 125 (62.5 but most kitchen scales will not measure that precisely.)
Subtract your actual starter number from my larger number. In this case, 240 minus 63 is 177.
Add this number to both the amount of water and the amount of flour. If there is no additional flour or water, then you have the number already. For this recipe, that would mean adding the 390 grams of flour in the recipe to the 177, giving us 567 grams of flour. There is no additional water, so we need 177 grams of water.
You can check your math by making sure the total of water, starter and flour all add up to around the same thing. The recipe as written has 480 grams of starter and 390 grams of flour, for a total of 870 grams. Our new calculation has 125 grams of starter, 177 grams of water, and 567 grams of flour for a total of 869. Close enough!