The Perfect Sourdough Challah

The cloudiest challah ever that will keep soft over a week, not that it will ever last that long!

My challah journey started about 2 years ago when I was baking in Tel Aviv and Ron, whose bakery I was allowed to use while there and I went on a mission to make sourdough challah. I had never done one before and we both thought how hard can it be? Well, let me put it like that, it’s hard until it isn’t. Which has a double meaning in this case because while the first ones came out soft, but a bit out of shape, others came out in shape, but a bit dense and staling quickly. I still remember the first one we baked so vividly! Maybe it was beginner’s luck, maybe it was me romanticising the trip to this beautiful place with all those incredibly kind and welcoming people, but that first challah we made seemed just perfect then and now.

Back home I’ve tried many times to reproduce this memory I had and while I came close a couple times I also constantly ran into proofing issues, issues with it baking weirdly, then there was shaping issues and often it was stale from day 3 on already. So every so often after putting it on the menu I took it off the menu again because I was unhappy with it. Customers kept asking for it though so I really deep dove into the process and took all my learnings from the last years and adjusted and adjusted and adjust until BOOOOOM, there it was. The tallest, softest, most beautiful looking challah I ever made! No sour smell or taste at all! An airy and bouncy crumb! I couldn’t quite believe it as from shaping to baking it increased to about 6-7 times its size and still looked like it could go further!

I’ve also tried to keep sugar and fats as low as possible as I wanted it to be light and not as rich as a brioche which I achieved by upping the egg content a bit while keeping olive oil and white sugar to a minimum. I’d not replace all sugar with honey as I find that normal sugar helps more with stability and longevity of the dough. It also worked perfectly for my baking schedule having little hands on time and being ready to bake after my breads are out of the oven which was always a struggle before as it fermented to fast or not fast enough and didn’t give me a big range to bake it in. This one now has probably a 2-3 hour long range at the end of the proof where you could bake it and be fine.

Being the skeptic I am I didn’t trust the result right away as I was almost there before and then the week after the result was different when temperatures and humidity changed so before letting myself believe I finally cracked the challah code I made it again and again and again and EVERYTIME it turned out perfect. Of course the final proofing time changed a little with temperatures changing but it was minor changes as the dough stayed stable and there was no under or over proofing issues in all my tests. Even when I thought I can’t push the fermentation further and it would turn sour it didn’t. It was always slightly sweet, even a bit yeasty in taste and incredibly soft. This week I even had a piece left that I baked the week before and on day 8 it was still soft without mold or any major staling (see video below).

This success that took me so long to achieve also brought back my long lost motivation to create and write as I was hitting a writer’s block the last quarter of 2024 and been struggling to get out of it. The more I pushed myself the less I was able to create, so eventually I just kinda let it go for a few weeks and focussed on life and testing formulas and just bake without writing, filming and sharing much. I think as creatives we need to understand that we are not machines and there isn’t a button to push to “function”. Sometimes it just needs time and healing of mind and body even if we don’t feel sick at all. Matters of the mind are sometimes tough ones to see and admit to and every so often we push and push without realizing that letting go of the problem is the only way to solving it.

So without further ado let’s dive into the process and formula of: