Shlissel Challah – The key to key challah

“And the Lord said onto Moses. Hearken, O Moses for ye shall take for yourself bread which hath been leavened, and a key shall be placed upon it…”

– Levitironomy 12:43

“R’ Akiva said in the name of the Rabbis, When the verse states “a key shall be placed upon it” the verse means the challah should be in the shape of a key. R’ Meir said: in Pumpadeesah I once saw a man place a key inside of a regular bread, and said that he was placing a key upon it, therefore what the verse means, is to just place a key inside of the bread”

– Tractate Bava Gedola 12b

“On the Shabbos following Pesach, one must make a challah either in the shape of a key, or with a key placed inside. Men of faith will follow both opinions, and make a challah in the shape of a key with a key on the inside.

– Machmanodies Sefer Hamitzvos

Ok, as you can clearly see the meforshim talk about shlissel challah, and actually there’s a Shita M’Fursemmes that discusses the Machmanodies, and compares it to mezuza (how going l’fi two da’os is actually going like neither), but we don’t have time for that.

Annnnyway, enough leytzanus (and apologies to whoever is still reading and has no idea what just happened)…let’s talk about challah.

As I’m sure you no doubt remember, we’ve covered challah before, but I’m here to tell you, I’ve uncovered the key to making challah, want to hear what it is?? Get a scale.

Maybe you’ve heard this diatribe a few million times whilst here in this weblog, the whole scale thing, and I’m fairly certain I’ve convinced a grand total of -4 people to buy a scale (yes, that means 4 people returned theirs…probably out of spite…you spiteful bunch), but seriously, what if I could give you a master formula that can be scaled up and down as needed to make challah? Well guess what fellow internerds, I’ve got you covered. So get a freakin scale already, like f’realzies.

Ok so here’s the master ratio for Challah, taken once again by Peter Reinhart’s book Crust and Crumb:

flour	100%
water	38%
eggs	21%
oil	6.25
sugar	12.5
salt	1.6
yeast	1.4

So we’ve spoken about baker’s percentages before, but to reiterate, here’s the general gist: all amounts are in proportion to the flour present, so the amount of flour is always denoted as 100%, and then all of the other percentages are the percent of that specific thing, in relation to the flour. So if you had 100 grams of flour, then you would need 38 grams of water, 21g of eggs, 6.25g of oil, and so on. I think you can see here why a scale makes this so much easier. All you need is one constant, so say you have 4 eggs, and want to make challah with that, well 4 eggs usually is in the 200 grams range (@ 50g per large egg), well from there we know, you would need 952 grams of flour, 361 grams of water, 60g of oil, and so on.

my worksheet…this is how we do baking in the fogel house

 

Now these numbers are fairly constant, but say you wanted to add more yolks (say you wanted a yellower challah, or wanted to boost the shelf life by increasing amount of fat and emulsification, etc…)  well keep the 21% but adjust it to include yolks. Want to do some coconut oil with the oil (you know, because coconut oil is a saturated fat, which will lend more structure, and more flavor), same idea…keep the % the same, but adjust as needed. Want to make your challah with beer instead of water??? Well that probably means you have a problem , but hey I’d join you in that most wonderful problem! [and no, the alcohol, doesn’t get “fully cooked off”…and yes, it might affect the gluten formation because of the alcohol, but don’t you bust my bubble!] The options are limitless.

look at that beautiful dough

Oh and one last thing, pretty much whenever I make bread, and I have the time, I like to “ferment” my dough. Now terminology aside, what I mean by that is, basically allowing the dough to rise verrrry slowly, so the yeast, flour, and enzymes have time to develop stuff (basically flavors, but also it affects the quality of the dough, brings out certain sugars, enhances browning, enhances gluten formation…that sorta stuff), the way we do that is to have the dough rise in the fridge. Now you can do that one of a few ways, the easiest way to do that is combine all your ingredients, and after kneading, place in the fridge to rise for up to 4 days (punching down and redistributing the gases every once in a while). Another way to do this is by making a poolish or a biga. Those are both pretty similar things, and what you do essentially is combine some flour and water (You want more water than flour, so in the order of 100-120% water [actually the difference between a biga and a poolish are the amounts of water, but I digress]) mix until combined, and let it sit in the fridge for up to 4 days (again, mixing every once in a while). Once you have your poolish/biga thingamabob, you then add it together with the rest of your dough, and complete the challah making process (obviously accounting for the amounts of water/flour in the biga).

Biga/Poolish
pardon the horrendous quality of the picture

Now we didn’t even discuss kneading, and forming dough, but we’ll leave that for the next time I decide to write about dough.

So there you have it! As a God fearing individual, I assume you will take it upon yourself to be m’kayim this mitzvas asey shel z’man grama of shlissel challah (oh and by the way, there are some shitas that say you can’t be yotzey if your wife makes it because she’s patur from this mitzva)

Matzah Balls

All right, so it’s that time of the month when I come out of hiding to contribute to the kosher food blogging world, in this month’s version of the Kosher Connection- Link up. If you’re new to the program, every month there’s a theme, and a bunch of reputable food bloggers, and myself, get together to give their version of that theme. This month’s theme is “Get well Gil.” For the uninitiated, Gil Marks is one of the foremost experts on kosher food, and it’s long history. In fact he even wrote a freaking encyclopedia on it! I happen to love the book, and it only weighs in at a whopping 650ish pages, so you know, it’s typical light reading fare. But in all honesty, the book is incredible, and it literally covers everything imaginable related to kosher food, from Adafina to Zwetschgenkuchen (“a cross between a cake and tart made with Italian prune plums”), I highly recommend taking a gander.

Anyway, I was trying to think what would be an appropriate recipe, and it dawned on me – Matzah Balls! Think about it – it’s the ultimate healing food, plus, it’s one of those foods that epitomizes Jewish cooking (sorry S’fardim, I guess you don’t count!…I joke, next time I’ll make Jachnun, or something scary sounding like that). Onward!

Quoting Gil in the Encyclopedia:

“..By the 12th century, the concept of dumplings, originally made from bread, had spread from Italy to Bohemia, where it was called knodel (knot). From there, the name traveled with variations in pronunciation, to southern Germany, Austria, and France. The term also traveled eastward to the Slavic regions. The most widespread Ashkenazic name for dumpling became knaidel/kneydl, which is better know by the plural knaidlach/kneydlakh”

As the medieval period waned, flour began to replace bread as the base…During the 8 days of Passover…Germans discovered that they could substitute matza for the bread or flour, creating the most widely known type..matzah knaidel…

It was only in the early 20th century, after Manischewitz introduced packaged matza meal, that this dumpling achieved mass popularization and it’s current status as an iconic Jewish food.

Matza balls consist of only a few ingredients – matza meal, eggs, a little far, a liquid, salt, and pepper. Using matza meal in place of flour, and adding eggs resulsts in a lighter dumpling. Adding fat…produces a more flavorful dumplings…

Now, ever since our post on chicken stock, I’m sure that like me, you also have some chicken shmaltz lying around in the fridge (or maybe some duck fat??), and seriously, what better way than to incorporate it into some matzah meal, with some of that stock…it’s like the circle of life, man. First you make chicken, then with the leftover bones and scraps, you make stock. With that stock you get the base of your chicken soup, and you also have shmaltz to make knaydlach….it’s so deep man.

I actually used Michael Ruhlman’s recipe for this (I like that everything is by weight…because, you know… a scale…I’m like a broken record over here…), and I took some matzah, and added it to a food processor to pulverize.

To that I added, the remaining dry ingredients: baking powder, some fresh rosemary (which I had lying around, but you can use whatever you see fit), salt, and black pepper.

I melted some fresh chicken fat (you can use vegetable oil if you’re a lightweight), added it to 4 eggs and 1/4 cup of fresh chicken stock, and mixed it all together.

Then I mixed together, the dry and wet ingredients, and after thoroughly combined, I let it sit in the fridge for at least 30 minutes, to fully hydrate.

 

Before you’re ready to go, bring a pot of salted water to a simmer.

Then I rolled it up into golf-ish sized balls (remember, they’re going to grow, so smaller than you expect….I make this mistake, every time mind you).

Dump the kneydels into the salted water, and cook until they’re nice and fluffy,  about 20-30 minutes.

And there you have it…there might be some of you out there (ahem – Phoenix Fresser..) why not just make this out of a box mix?? Well I’m going to preempt that by saying, Hashem gets angry when you use a box mix (especially duncan hines…but that’s another post).

Anyway, we here at the Kosher Gastronome Headquarters would like to wish a full and speedy recovery to Gil (Yitzchak Simcha ben Baila).

As always with the Kosher Link Ups, click on the funny frog guy below to see what the other peoples are doing.

Ingredients:

• 4 squares of matzo (ie –  1 cup/140 grams matzo meal), well pulverized in a food processor
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 1/4 cup/60 grams schmaltz, melted (or vegetable oil)
• 1/4 cup/60 milliliters chicken stock or water
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/8 teaspoon chopped rosemary (optional)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

Directions:

1. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and stir until they are all thoroughly mixed. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.
2. With damp hands, form the matzo mixture into 8 golf ball-sized orbs (they will double in size).
3. Bring a pot of salted water to a simmer
4. Drop in balls, and cook for 20-30 minutes.

 

Boneless Chicken rollups with Porter reduction

So apparently there are some people who mistakenly think that white meat is better than dark meat. Craziness right? Now don’t get me wrong, white meat that’s properly cooked, and fresh is awesome, and bad chicken is bad chicken no matter what color…however that being said, all things being equal, dark meat is way better. Now there are some that claim dark meat is annoying because it comes with bones, and these people, being the lazy people they are, don’t want to have to go through the trials and tribulations of having to work when they eat, so to these weird people, any sort of impediment in their course to stuffing said food down their gullets in one fluid motion is considered bad, so ergo, bone-in chicken is bad. I know what you’re thinking, who is crazy enough to think this, right?? Well I’m not going to name names (ahem – Dr Shmalexman) but suffice it to say, people like this do exist. Where am I going with this diatribe? Well what if we could take dark meat and remove the bone so even those lazy people out there can enjoy good chicken. I know what you’re thinking, why not just buy boneless dark meat, right? Well the only answer I have is, have you seen how much more they charge you for removing the bone? Just do it yourself, and it’s really not that hard. Onward!

So butchery is a great way to take out some aggression, and I highly recommend cutting down a whole chicken at least once, just to get a feel for it (plus, the chicken always comes out neater, and another benefit is you can make chicken galantine, which you should definitely do), anyway, if you decide not to butcher a whole chicken, go grab some chicken legs, and lets start cutting. First you’re going to want to cut the drumstick from the thigh, and the easiest way to do that is to take the bottom, and squeeze the leg and thigh together and start cutting down, and you should be able to wriggle your knife in between the two pieces, and cut right through.

Once you have the leg, you can slice down directly over the bone to open it up, and then slide your knife under the bone but on top of the meat, to completely separate the meat from the bone. Then kind of do the same thing with the thigh, but I’m sorry, because I don’t have any good pictures, but basically cut along the bone, and then slide the knife underneath to cut meat away, and where the two bones meet you’ll need to cut away, whatever,you’ll figure it out, right? Gravy sauce.

Allright, so now that you have your cut up chicken bottoms (or bought deboned thighs, because I know you guys, and I know that you’re thinking, hey why go through all this work, when I can just buy it…well you’re what’s wrong with our society!)…ok sorry for that.. moving right along…so I took the chicken, and rolled it up so it would be thicker, and more uniform, and decided you know what would be a great application for these pieces of chicken? Braising.

Braising is, in my opinion, a very underutilized technique. The idea behind it is like this – the gentlest and easiest way to cook something is by using water as a heat transfer medium (ie – it’s more predictable to cook something in water, than in air [the oven] because of how well water can transfer heat), but there’s one caveat, high heat develops flavor. So braising combines the best of both worlds, you get high heat cooking, and liquid cooking. The way it works is thusly – first you brown whatever protein you’re cooking, remove the meat, and add whatever veggies. Then you add enough liquid so that it will end up submerging half of the meat, cover the whole thing with a tight fitting lid, and continue cooking.

For our application, I rolled up the boneless chicken, and tied it with some twine. Set up a dutch oven over high heat, and browned the chicken on all sides.

While that was cooking, I mixed some honey, dijon mustard, hot sauce, and porter beer. I removed the chicken, added the liquid to the pot, and scraped the bottom while it was cooking (as the chicken browns, it develops what’s called fond on the bottom of the pan, which is a big source of flavor, so scraping it off the bottom helps). I added the chicken back, covered the pot, and placed in a 350 degree oven for about 30 minutes…I think.

When it was all done, the porter had reduced by a lot, and made an excellent thick sauce, and the chicken was actually pretty awesome, and I think you should definitely give this a try.

So yeah, that’s all for now, if you have any questions, let’s talk.

I’m not going to lie, I miss you random people I mostly don’t know, so I’m going to leave you with an empty promise that I’m going to try and post more often. I really want to but you know, life and all that gets in the way, so yeah, first world problems…whatever…enjoy the snow.

Gravlax

I don’t know how the gene for liking preserved fish is managing to hold on so tightly, but somehow through the throes of evolution, people are still enjoying it, and not because they need to. You see back in the day, if you wanted to eat certain foods that weren’t just caught, such as fish which have a nasty habit of spoiling rather quickly, you needed to preserve them first. The problem with food, is that we’re not the only organisms that need it to survive. Apparently there are these tiny little organisms called bacteria, and they just love the taste of meat. So how do we get rid of said bacteria? We don’t…we just learn to get rid of the ones that we don’t like. And we’ve done that rather smartly (if we do say so ourselves) by subjecting the bacteria to something that we’re usually ok with, namely: salt. It’s rather ingenious, by putting enough salt, you basically are depleting the amount of water the bacteria can get to (through the process of osmosis), and either killing the bacteria or slowing them down enough that they can’t harm you. Another added benefit of adding salt to meat, is it dissolves the muscle proteins, making them weaker and more tender, but at the same time, the dehydration of the tissue allows the whole meat to be more dense and compact. What you end up with is this tender yet firm piece of animal flesh, ripe for placing on top of a bagel.

Gravlax means “buried fish” and probably is named such because back in the day, the fishermen who caught the fish, didn’t even have a lot salt lying around to preserve the fish, so they would lightly salt it, and bury it underground. The fish would then ferment (which is technically a different step then just salting), and would have a very strong, cheesy taste. Modern versions of gravlax is simply salting a fish, and dry curing it for a few days.

Most gravlax recipes are pretty standard. Cover a piece of salmon with a lot of salt and sugar, place a whole bunch of dill on top, place something heavy over the fish to weigh it all down, and let it sit in the refrigerator for a few days. The only things set in stone is the amount of salt and sugar, and that you need to weigh it down, other than that, you can play around with it. You can use a different herb if you’d like, different sugars, etc…It does help to baste the fish once a day with pooled liquid to help redistribute the salt, and to make sure it’s evenly coated.

For our gravlax, I followed the America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe. They used brown sugar for it’s slight smokiness, and also drizzled a little brandy over the fish. For the brandy, I used 777, which for some odd reason I had lying around, which I figured since it’s not really for drinking, maybe I can use it on fish (I’m still not sure if I could). If you don’t have any, it’s fine, there will be enough liquid that exudes out from the salt.

After three days in the chill chest, wipe away everything from on top of the fish, and slice it really thinly.

This “recipe” is really simple, all you need is time, and if left whole it can be left in the fridge for up to 1 week, just slice what you want, and use the skin to flap over the cut surface.

Anyway, in case you’re wondering, this is not the same as what we commonly refer to as “lox.” Lox apparently is Yiddish for salmon, but the lox we usually buy is cold smoked salmon. We didn’t get into it, but another way of preserving meats is by smoking it (although it really only “cures” the outer most layer), and when it comes to smoking you can either smoke with hot smoke (what you normally think of when you think of smoking [generally anywhere above 90 degrees, I think]), or you can cold smoke it, which leaves the meat raw, but gets the benefits of smoking (flavor, and anti-microbial).

I love lox, like a lot, I could eat it every day, but if you’ve ever had fresh lox (whether cold smoked salmon, gravlax, or whatever), you’d see there’s a world of a difference between fresh and the other stuff, to the point where, and not to sound snobby, but I wouldn’t even eat the non-fresh stuff, it’s just not worth the heartburn. This gravlax I made was up there was one of the best lox (I’m just gonna lump them all in one category) I’ve ever had. It was difficult to slice paper thin, but it was still awesome.

If you give this a try, let me know what you think

adapted from America’s Test Kitchen

Ingredients:

• ⅓ cup packed (2 ⅓ ounces) light brown sugar
• ¼ cup kosher salt
• 1-pound skin-on center-cut salmon fillet
• 3 tablespoons brandy (optional)
• 1 cup roughly chopped fresh dill

Directions:

1. Combine sugar and salt in small bowl. Place salmon in 13 by 9-inch glass baking dish and drizzle brandy slowly over top (it will drip down sides). Cover the salmon with the suger-salt mixture, patting it down, and then cover it with the chopped dill.
2. Cover salmon loosely with plastic wrap, then place a dish on the tallest part of the salmon (close to center of fillet). Weigh baking dish with 2 or 3 heavy cans and transfer salmon to refrigerator.
3. Every day for next two days, Take off the cans and dish, and baste the fish with the liquid that pooled on the bottom. Replace cans and dish, and place back in the fridge
4. On the third day, drain off all of the liquid and scrape off the dill. Slice the salmon as thinly as possible on bias.(The salmon can be refrigerated for up to 1 week; it should be left whole and not sliced until ready to serve, and use the “flap” of skin to cover the cut surface)