What sets babka apart from every other loaf of cinnamon bread or a pan au chocolate is the beautiful layered look that twists its way through the loaf, making each slice a new visual adventure. When making babka is this easy, it’s borderline dangerous! How To Twist Babka Dough And, you don’t need to dirty two bowls for mixing and rising.Īnd, once the kneading of the dough is put on auto-pilot, making babka goes from a long, labor intensive process, to an easy process with much less hands-on time. What we like about the bread machine is that after prepping your ingredients you can forget about the dough for a while. Rather than putting our stand mixer to work, we decided to make the dough for our babka in our bread machine, using the dough setting. Richer doughs tend to be quite soft, making them difficult to knead by hand and the perfect candidate for a long kneading time with a dough hook in a stand mixer. The dough for babka is a rich yeast dough, full of butter and eggs. Sure, you can’t go wrong with a chocolate laden loaf, but this cinnamon babka is like a cinnamon roll in loaf form.Īnd, we are seriously addicted. (But, we do give you the option of a chocolate variation in the recipe below.)Įlaine from Seinfeld might think that cinnamon babka is the “lesser babka”, but we’d have to disagree. Just enough that they do their job of creating a creamy, tender loaf.Īnd, we’ve opted to stick with the the cinnamon filling, rather than chocolate. Although not parve, we’re keeping the sugar and butter to a more reasonable level. We’re sticking with the more traditional version of babka today. To appeal to the American palate, more sugar and butter were used, because what isn’t made better by more butter and more sugar? And, to appeal to the “trendy” American desires, the rolls began to be filled with chocolate spreads (like Nutella), as well as the more traditional traditional cinnamon filling. And these rolled treats began appearing on Jewish Holiday tables and at other parties year round.Ī few years ago, you would have only found babka in Jewish or Eastern European bakeries, where it was often dense and dry, and typically made parve (without dairy) for the Jewish dietary laws.īut, with the exploding popularity of babka, people started adding butter and milk to the dough because of the tenderness those ingredients give the loaf. The little leftover loaves became larger, deliberate loaves, even baked by Jewish bakeries. It’s this version of babka that came over to America with the Jewish immigrants.įor these families, babka became a treat that reminded them of the mothers and grandmothers who had prepared it back home. Jewish mothers (and grandmothers) took this idea and started rolling leftover pieces of challah bread with jam or cinnamon filling and baking it along with their Shabbat challah (the challah bread for their Sabbath meals). This bread gained its name because the round, fluted shape looked like a Polish grandmother’s pleated skirt! Polish Babka, while still a yeasted, rich bread, studded with sweet elements, typically looks more like a bundt cake because it’s baked in special fluted, bundt-type pans. In Poland, they make a cake called “babka,” however it looks much different than the twisted Jewish bread that we are familiar with in the States. Poland to be exact where the word “babcia” (BAHB-cha) means “grandmother”. If we trace babka’s roots, we find ourselves in Central Europe. While visions of beautifully contrasted, layered loaves fill our heads when we think of babka in the States, babka hasn’t always looked this way. What makes this sweet bread stand out from the others is the artistic swirl of filling that resides within the fluffy layers. What Is Babka?īabka is a sweet yeast bread, kind of like a cross between a challah and a brioche, but a bit sweeter and richer, like Italian panettone. Tender and fluffy, and bursting with cinnamon flavor! Our Bread Machine Cinnamon Babka recipe makes this impressive, twisted sweet bread super easy to put together.
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