In response to my earlier post about baking bread, Carol asked how our challah turned out. Well, the short answer is that it turned out terrible.
The long answer is that it turned out so heavy that it was chewy and lumpy on the inside, and rock-hard and nearly black on the outside. It could probably have made an effective weapon if you needed to bludgeon someone with it. Even M didn’t want more than 1 slice of it — and when a teenage boy won’t eat it , you know it’s bad. Then one day while we were all at work and school, the cat assaulted the challah while it sat on the counter in a plastic bag. We came home to discover the plastic bag pierced with dozens of claw marks, and the challah slightly shredded. The cat seldom gets on the counters and has never attacked any other food item we’ve left out, but clearly he saw this challah as a threat.
So… if you have a good recipe for challah, please let us know. I had used the recipe from the latest issue of Yankee magazine, but I think they must have printed it wrong, because the dough felt wrong from the start.
In other bread-related news, E and I have a problem that is probably fairly common to women who coupled up in their 30s: we each brought a full set of kitchenware to the partnership, and yet much of it is in rather poor condition. I still have the pans that I bought at Salvation Army for 25 cents each when I was in college. E has a miscellaneous collection of a few good things that were gifts from her parents, and then other items accumulated from former roommates. The end result is that our cabinets are overflowing, and yet when you actually look for a matching pair of bread pans, you find 4 different pans that could be nicknamed Rusty, Sticky, Scratchy, and Scary.
We’ve recently started an effort to replace our terrible baking pans with good ones, now that we’re grown-ups who can afford more than 25 cents per pan. So I just bought 2 new bread pans. And Rusty, Sticky, Scratchy, and Scary will go join my old muffin tin Blotchy in the metal recycling bin at the town dump. Because they’re not even worth donating at this point.
Hey ladies! This is the recipe I used: http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/sweet-challah-10000001120286/ I did not use poppy seeds however, because my kids don’t like them. It turned out very pretty and super yummy!! Give it a try! Thanks for the shout out!!
Thanks Carol! That has a very different egg-to-flour ratio than the recipe we tried earlier, and seems much more promising; I’ll have to try it.