Challah Wallah

There is a simple joy in baking bread. It’s unlike any other type of baking. The ingredients are deceptively simple. The timing is known, the process is straightforward… so why on Earth can’t I ever get it right?!

Ever since I got married, I’ve been (not always) making bread. Part of our faith involves blessing the wine and bread every Friday night, and you get a lot more out of it if you make your own bread. I’m sure I’d get a lot more out of the wine if I had my own vineyard, but when I started, we couldn’t even get wine up in the Himalayas, so… count your blessings.

When I first started out, I had a lot more advantages than I do now. I could use real wheat flour and eggs and milk. I had a marble countertop (because marble is really cheap near where they quarry it) that I could whack the bread onto to make it fluffy. Then I could braid it into challah, which is this wonderful braided bread that looks and smells great. Then you put an egg glaze on it… boom! My newlywed wife used to boast about my bread to her friends. One of them called me the “challah-wallah” (wallah means “seller” in Hindi) and that name stuck.

However, once we left the mountain and moved back to the States, my bread making stopped being as easy. Try throwing a ball of dough onto a plastic countertop and you’ll shake the ever-living crap out of your kitchen. So my bread didn’t turn out as fluffy. Then we discovered my wife had a milk allergy, so we removed milk. Then we realized that wheat did not agree with me, so we had to use alternative wheats. Then egg was a problem for the boy. Then yeast is a concern for the ladies in the family.

So how do you make bread without all of the components? Or as I phrase it, “How do you make bricks without straw?”

At first, we ended up having oily pancakes. Thankfully, over the years, the world has become now full of alternatives. You can grind up flax seeds and make an egg substitute. We use sourdough starter to get some lift in the dough. We use spelt flour, and when that doesn’t work for me, we use chickpea, rice, and whatever GF flour we can find. Milk turns out not to be as important as you might think. Some weeks, our bread turns out great, others… it’s a gooey mess in the middle and you have to wait until Sunday to bake it again as toast.

Nowadays, we can’t braid the dough because it doesn’t stay together enough to create the lines to make the braids, but it turns out you can buy molds that can give the illusion of braided dough (see my picture above). Sometimes we just give up and put the dough in cupcake molds.

Why did the simple joy of baking bread become a science experiment? Am I the only one who has these problems? Tell me your bread-baking woes in the comments below!