Dissolve yeast in 20 oz warm water in a large measuring cup.

Stir in 1/4 cup sugar, and allow the yeast to work for some minutes while you prepare the dry ingredients.

Place the 8 cups of flour, salt, remaining sugar, and turmeric in a large bowl. Mix until the faint color of the turmeric is uniform through the flour.

Add oil and honey, then top off with the other half of the flour and mix well again. Now add the proofed yeast 10 oz at a time. Mix the flour after each addition of yeast, stirring up from the bottom to insure as much as is possible that all the dry flour gets mixed in. (As soon as the yeast has been added, put several ounces of cool water in the measuring cup, swoosh it around to pick up the yeast remnants and set it aside to be used for adjusting the dough.)

At this point, the consistency of the mix is grainy and not very dough like. It may be too dry in one part and a bit soggy in another. Kneading will cure all of this. During the kneading, a complex chemical process is going on. The yeast is consuming sugars and protein in the mix and growing. As it does this, it modifies the flour mix and turns it into that elastic and rather remarkable substance that we call dough. As the yeast does its work, it requires water. Getting the dough to come out with the proper plasticity is a matter of touch. The advantage of hand kneading is that you cannot avoid knowing exactly how the dough feels.

You will knead the dough for about 10 minutes. Turn the flour mixture out onto a wide flat surface, such a counter top, and scrape out all the stuff sticking to the bowl. Included in front of you will be some very wet globs and some flour that is pretty dry. Keep folding the lump, pressing it out with the heels of your hands and squeezing with your fingers until you have worked the mass into a reasonably uniform ball. Adding a bit of the water with the traces of yeast to particularly dry material will help it to mix in and become part of the dough. By this time—about 6 minutes—the ball will have earned the name “dough,” but there is still work to be done. Take a brief break and put the empty bowl in the sink and fill it with hot water.

Now back to the dough.

Dump out the hot water from the mixing bowl and clean it of any remnants of the original mix. Then rinse and dry it. Now oil the bowl liberally with olive oil. Give your dough that last minute of kneading. Put the dough in the bowl, turning to grease it on all sides and also to make sure that the bowl sides are oiled. Cover the bowl with a sheet of parchment paper and a damp, clean dish towel. The time to rise is dependent on ambient temperature. The first rise is typically about 1 hour.

Punch the dough down and knead briefly. Use a heavy, sharp knife to cut the dough in half. To make two equal loaves, I weigh the halves and bring them to the same weight. Typically, by this time each of the two dough balls weighs about 37 ounces.

Divide one dough ball into four equal boules by weight. Squeeze each boule out into a long cylinder with your hands and then roll each one into a “snake,” using a back and forth motion on a hard, smooth surface. Each “snake” should be about 16” long. Pinch the strands together at one end, braid them*, and pinch them together at the other end. Finish by gently rolling the completed loaf on the flat surface (counter top) to get a smooth, compact loaf. A thin wooden skewer can be used to secure the strands at each end. Repeat for the second loaf. Allow to rise for another 3/4 of an hour.

Preheat your oven to 400 °F for at least half an hour. You can use a baking stone in the oven, but, in the absence of a stone, a cookie tin works well.

Now comes a choice. If you want poppy seeds on your challah, you must use some binder to hold them on the bread. (If you don’t want poppy seeds, skip to the next paragraph.) For a vegan binder, take a tablespoon of flax seed and two ounces of water. Mix in a blender at high speed until the mixture gets milky. Then brush it on the loaves and sprinkle heavily with poppy seeds. [Poppy seeds in bulk can be purchased inexpensively over the internet.] Remember that the loaves will triple in size so that dense spread of seeds will thin out by quite a bit. Now to the baking.

Using a baker’s peel (large spatula) with a thin coating of corn meal as a lubricant, place loaves on the stone or baking sheet. Bake for 34 minutes. While baking, about every 5 to 10 minutes, spray the walls of the oven and the bread with a mist of water to increase humidity in the oven and thus get a crisper crust. For uniformity, reverse the breads front–to–back at about 17 minutes.

Leave the loaves on a drying rack for at least half an hour to allow moisture to escape. If you freeze a loaf or store it in the refrigerator overnight, allow to come to room temperature and then put it in a warming oven at 300 °F for about 20 minutes, finishing 10 or 15 minutes, before serving.


Notes on Making Challah


Mixing Stage

I use a hand mixer to do the initial mix is in the heavy ceramic bowl. The blender is easier, less messy and this mixing is before the actual kneading, which should be done by hand. I try (but never quite succeed) to get all of the flour wet before I dump it out on the kneading counter to begin the kneading.


Risings

The first rise is done in the mixing bowl. For both the first and second rise, I use a sheet of parchment paper between the damp towel and the dough. It keeps the dough from sticking to the towel. I make use of the first sheet folded up between dough and scale during the divide-and-braid stage.

For braiding, I use Rivi’s weave, a simple pattern I learned from my granddaughter. Lay the 4 “snakes” together and pinch the strands together at one end. Starting at the right, weave the outside strand over, under and over, ending with that strand now on the left. Repeat with the strand now on the right. Continue until the stands come to the other end. Pinch the second end together.

When I have finished braiding a loaf, I squeeze gently from the end and role the whole loaf back and forth. This compacts the loaf and shapes it. Once satisfied with the compactness and shape, I insert a 6 in. wooded skewer sideways in each end to secure the strands.

After braiding and inserting the skewers, I put the formed loaves into non-stick aluminum cake pan, one to a pan, with a thin layer of corn meal on the bottom. The loaves are definitely going to grow, but the dough will be soft at this point, so the growth will be mostly lateral. The final shaping rise which yields the beautiful loaf will happen in the oven. The second rise takes about 1 hour at 70 °F.


Into and In the Oven

Seeding is done after the second rise and just before baking. If you are seeding the loaf, coat the upper surface of the loaf with your seed-glue of choice and sprinkle the poppy seed liberally. The loaf is very soft and a tad sticky at this point so the peel must be “lubricated” with corn meal to allow the loaf to slide off in the oven. To transfer the loaf to the peel, I use a large plastic spatula from one side and my fingers from the other. The peel allows me to place the first loaf near the back of the baking stone, where I use the spatula to ease it off the peel. Repeat for the second loaf, once again coating the peel with cornmeal. Set the timer for 34 minutes.

After loading the loaves, spray water on the sides of the oven. I use one of the small hand sprayers that are often used on indoor greenery, but not one with too fine a mist. I repeat this every 7 minutes. Don’t be afraid to spray on the loaves themselves. If you are doing enough, you should get a puff of steam in the face when you next open the oven door.

At about 16 minutes from the end of the bake, you should remove the loaves and reverse their positions. No oven with two loaves in it can be uniform. You will note at this point that the two sides of each loaf are not uniformly brown. By reversing position (including putting the inside sides toward the oven wall or door) you will get a more uniform colored crust.