Challah (hallah) bread, or as I call it, the string cheese of bread, is one of my absolute favorites when it’s fresh out of the oven. When you pull the crumb apart it peels off in thin layers of fluffy homemade goodness. No other bread is quite like it. With a little patience and proper techniques, anyone can make it. And it makes the ultimate French toast.

One of the bonuses about making quality food at home is that many dishes allow you to make multiple meals with it. It’s like getting two meals out of one. Such as homemade bread. The recipes that follow a tasty fresh out of the oven loaf are endless. And with Challah Bread, Frenchy Toast is the ultimate follow up recipe. How impressed would your wife be if she came home one day to find the kids chowing down one of your steaming hot loafs of Challah Bread. Then imagine how impressed she would be to wake up the following morning to the drool inducing aroma of Frenchy Toast, made with the very same bread you baked the night before. Hell, you might even get you some after that. Come on, you know it’s been a while…

Challah Bread

Ingredients:

• 4 Cups Bread Flour
• 2 Tablespoons Sugar
• 1 Teaspoon Salt
• 1 1/3 Teaspoon Instant Yeast
• 2 Tablespoons Vegetable Oil
• 2 Large Eggs, Slightly Beaten
• 2 Large Egg Yolks, Slightly Beaten
• ¾ Cup plus 2 Tablespoons to 1 1/8 cups Water
• 2 Egg whites, whisked until frothy, for egg wash
• Sesame or poppy seeds

Time to make:
15 minutes to mix. 3.5 hours fermentation, shaping, and proofing. 30 to 40 minutes to bake, depending on size.

Stir together the flour, sugar, salt, and yeast in a mixing bowl, set aside. (Note to self: When holding my camera inside the bowl to shoot the flour, remember not to turn the mixer on full speed because flour will cling on the internal sensor and jack up future photos.)

 

In a separate bowl, whisk together the oil, eggs and yolks, and ¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons water. (Note to self: When holding my camera inside the bowl to shoot the liquids, remember not to turn the mixer on full speed because globs of egg will land on your lens again.)

 

Pour the egg mixture into the flour mixture, mix with a spoon (or on low speed with the paddle attachment) until all the ingredients gather and form a ball. Add the remaining water if needed

Kneed for about 10 minutes by hand, or at medium-low speed for 6 minutes with the dough hook. Sprinkling in more flour if needed to make a soft, supple, but not sticky dough.

 

Lightly oil a large bowl. Form the dough into a boule and transfer into the bowl, rolling it around to coat it with oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Ferment for 1 hour at room temperature. (I only used this small bowl for demonstration purposes only, and it looks cool for a picture.)

This is what your dough should look like when it doubles in size.

This is what happens when you find out your brothers in the hospital and you have to go visit him while the dough rises, and it rises way too long.

Remove the dough from the bowl and divide into 3 equal pieces. Form each into a boule and cover them with a towel and let them rest on the counter for ten minutes. Roll out the pieces into strands, each the same length.

Place the strands on the counter, parallel to one another, straight out in front of you. This braid begins in the middle, enabling the finished loaf to be thicker in the middle and narrow on the ends. From the left, number the strands 1, 2, 3. Beginning in the middle of the loaf and working toward you, follow this pattern: right outside strand over the middle strand (3 over 2): Left outside strand over the middle strand (1 over 2). Repeat until you reach the bottom end of the dough. Pinch the end closed to seal and rotate the loaf 180 degrees so that the unbraided end is facing you. Continue braiding, but now weave the outside strand under the middle stran until you reach the end of the loaf. Pinch together the tips at both ends to seal the finished loaf.

Line a sheet with parchment paper and transfer the loaf to the pan. Brush the loaves with egg wash. Mist the loaves with spray oil and cover loosely with plastic wrap. Let rise for 60 to 75 minutes, or until 1 1/5 times it’s original size. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees with the rack on the middle shelf. Brush with egg wash and sprinkle sesame seeds/poppy seeds on top. I like Poppy, for obvious reasons, and Lilly likes sesame, so I do half and half.

Bake for 20 minutes. Rotate the pan 180 degrees and continue baking for 20 to 45 minutes. The bread should be a rich golden brown and register 190 degrees in the center. Some recipes would tell you to let it rest before slicing, but I would tell you to tear that sucker apart immediately and start scarfing it down all slathered up with butter and honey. That’s how we do it around here.

Fresh golden goodness.

You know you've made it right when you get smiles like this.

And you know it tastes good when you get drool like that.

Want to really impress the wife? Then make some homemade French toast for the family on the weekend, with the home made Challah bread you whipped up the day before.

Toasty French Ingredients:

• 1 medium egg per 1 inch slice of Challah Bread
• Cinnamon
• Molasses
• Salt
• Sour Cream or heavy cream
• Vanilla
• Fresh strawberries on top
• Bacon, thick meaty slices
• Real Maple Syrup

You may be wondering where the measurements are. We don’t need no stinking measurements when it comes to our Frenchy. It’s all to your particular taste. French toast can be done in so many ways, with so many diverse ingredients, who am I to tell you how much of what to put in? This recipe is the way I have come to like my Frenchy over the years, and sometimes I even play with it and use other ingredients and vary the quantities. You can use honey rather than molasses, and it turns out sweet, or heavy cream in place of sour cream, and sometimes I add maple syrup to the mix as a built in syrupy flavor, occasionally I will grind in some fresh nutmeg right from the berry for a little extra kick. A dash of that, a sprinkle of those and a dollop of that, use at your own discretion.

Good sized one inchers.

Dump the ingredients into a bowl and pulverize them together. Then poor it into a flat dish or baking pan to allow room to dip the bread into it.

Let the bread soak in the egg for a little to absorb it. Some people do a quick dip to just coat the surface, but then, they don’t know French Toast like I know French Toast. We go way back. And I know that the egg likes to penetrate that Frenchy, deep into it’s soft fluffy goodness. The trick with allowing extra egg to soak into the bread is to slow cook it. Just as my fellow Doug tells us to slow cook our omelets, so to shall we slow cook our Frenchy. This allows the inner egg to cook through while preventing the outside from scorching. If you cook it too high the inside will still be soggy when the outside is overdone. Set on a medium-low heat to cook.

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