An Enriching Experience

While bread may seem, at first glance, to be a commodity product, it takes on an almost unlimited variety of different forms. However, these forms can be divided into main families: those made with a lean dough, which generally contains only water, flour, salt and yeast; and those made with an enriched dough which contain additions such as sugar, oil/butter, eggs, milk and so on.

Though I fully acknowledge that lean dough breads have their place, I am not, personally, overly fond of them. The enriched dough breads bring so much more to the party that they can stand on their own without being constructed into a sandwich, smothered in jams and nut butters, battered and fried into french toast, and so on. I delight in a bread that has a soft, moist crumb that you can enjoy with nothing more than a kiss of butter, if even that.

Possibly the most recognizable enriched bread these days would be brioche. Truly, brioche is a delight. To eat. To prepare, it is tedium and toil. Unlike most breads, even most enriched breads, where all the dough ingredients are assembled up-front, the high butter content of brioche requires that the dough, minus the butter, be mixed and kneaded first, after which the butter is kneaded in a little at a time.

Rubbish to that.

Instead, consider challah. Religious tradition aside, it is a much more manageable bread to prepare. The use of oil rather than butter means we're back to just dumping everything into a bowl and then mixing and kneading like any other bread dough. The resulting loaf is hardly a compromise, still having a delightfully moist and chewy texture with a rich sweetness that avoids descending into the territory of cakes while solidly establishing itself as a pastry-style bread.

And so it is that I chose that style of bread to bake.

Now some would argue that a proper challah would be braided rather than rolled into a plain rectangular loaf. To those people, I invite you to spend your time however you see fit, as I do as I please with mine.

The resulting bread is every bit as delicious as I had hoped, and the preparation was no more difficult than any other style I've ever made.