A wonderful healthy way to celebrate Challah-ween!
Here’s yet another instance of improved ingredients making an already good product into something particularly special. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how amazing the Chocolate Chip Spelt Pancakes at the Roadhouse have gotten recently—they’re now made with freshly milled spelt from the Bakehouse and the dark bean-to-bar Nicaraguan chocolate from our friends at French Broad chocolate in Asheville. This week, I’m writing about yet another amazing alt-version of “bread and chocolate”: a special two-day-only offering of Chocolate Challah– classic challah from Zingerman’s Bakehouse’s, made with lots of fresh eggs and clover honey, but this time liberally laced with that same very flavorful, dark French Broad chocolate.
Basically, this special-bake bread is a more down-to-earth version of the chocolate-loaf goodness that babka brings to the world. Both offer eminently accessible ways to enjoy the beauty of bread and chocolate with a wonderful bit of a Jewish accent. While challah as it is made at Zingerman’s Bakehouse is a centuries-old European Jewish tradition, I’d imagined that the idea of adding chocolate would pretty surely be 20th-century American. Much to my happy surprise though, I also found references to Hungarian Jewish families doing much the same. Whatever its origins, it’s marvelously good. You can just do what I do and rip off a chunk to eat with coffee or tea. You can toast it and spread it with butter. If you like orange and chocolate, spoon on some orange marmalade. If you pick up the Chocolate Challah on Friday, it can make for a great Shabbos dessert. Or you can use it to make French toast over the weekend.
