Tag: Food

Categories
Books CCAR Press

Finding My Bashert Challah Recipe: A Rabbi’s Journey into Jewish Bread Baking

On the Bread Trail: Jewish Baking Around the World by Rabbi Deborah R. Prinz explores the rich history, traditions, and spiritual connections of Jewish breads across cultures. In this excerpt from the preface, Rabbi Prinz explains how her curiosity about chocolate babka led her to discover the joys of baking challah.

My Jewish bread trail started with chocolate—specifically, chocolate in babka. My curiosity about twisty chocolate fillings in cakey babka flowed from my first book, On the Chocolate Trail, and its stories about Jews and chocolate. Locating, tasting, and reading about chocolate babka was one thing; baking it was another. I got overwhelmed, especially given that I baked cookies and cakes, but not breads. My skill set did not include working with yeast. In all of my decades of rabbinic work, I hadn’t even baked a challah from scratch . . . ever. Neither had my parents nor my grandparents.

Back during my days as a congregational rabbi, I would pick up a challah on Friday mornings at the preschool or at the bakery or pull a store-bought, unbaked, pre-braided challah from the freezer. In my mind and in my schedule, there was absolutely no time for the multiple steps of kneading, braiding, and baking. Certainly not weekly. Moreover, as a pioneering woman rabbi, I didn’t want to be defined by the kitchen. As I thought about chocolate in babka, I realized that I had a lot to learn about the multitudes of Jewish breads for the celebrations of the Sabbath, holidays, and life-cycle occasions.

Finding My Bashert Challah Recipe

I decided to start by baking braided, fluffy challah. It seemed simpler than babka—no fillings. I began with research. I traipsed to the library to read and collect recipes. I waded through instructions in multiple cookbooks. Wait, is challah supposed to be sweet? Made with water or milk? Oil? Eggs? Should I use all-purpose or bread flour? And, oy, what type of yeast: instant, active dry, or compressed fresh? Which brand? The details confused me. I purchased a food thermometer and a rolling pin. Baking pans piled up. Sacks of unbleached flours loaded my shelves. I checked my pantry for sugar, oil, and parchment paper.

I tried to understand the technical stages of bread making—proofing, fermenting, punching, and shaping. That generated more questions. Do all of the ingredients need to be at room temperature? Why do some recipes require testing the yeast’s viability and others don’t? Do I need a dough hook? Should the dough rise two or three times, and if three rises really make the bread tastier, why doesn’t everyone advise it? How am I supposed to check if the bread’s done by tapping its hot bottom for a hollow sound without burning myself? Most importantly, will I ever find the best recipe? Ironically, I was a very experienced rabbi, but a novice in this aspect of Jewish life. How could I acquire enough expertise to produce good, much less great, challah? So I stuck with my comfort zone: research. More books. More recipes. More library time.

Categories
Ethics Rabbis Reform Judaism Torah

Parashat Sh’mini, Mindfulness, and Food

In Vermont, where I spent the last year living (and where I still spend my time off), there’s a beautiful culture of paying attention to where food comes from. In part this is because of the agricultural heritage of the state, and lucky for me, it’s meant that I’ve made a number of friends who are farmers. As a result, over the past year I’ve farm-sat when friends have gone on vacation (to Israel, no less – our local Jewish educator is also a farmer), helped friends tap their maple trees to make homegrown maple syrup and cared for chickens and lambs. I have harvested the summer’s abundance, too: dried garlic, blanched kale, made raspberry jam from local berries picked by my own two hands, and turned pounds (literally, pounds) of basil into many frozen containers of pesto – enough for the (very) long Vermont winter! I’ve even learned to make my own sourdough bread and created my own sourdough starter.

For a Rabbi’s kid who grew up in Chicago this has been a wonderful, unexpected and delicious adventure. I feel truly blessed. I have learned, intimately, where my food comes from, and the incredible labor that it takes to feed the state of Vermont. I have also become a regular at the local farmer’s market, friendly with the guy who sells me my kale, have found a farm where I pick up eggs and bread year-round, and have, overall become much, much healthier. I have also, for the first time ever, begun to understand the place of dietary laws in the Biblical imagination and what it must have felt like to live according to an agricultural rhythm where you always worried what the new harvest might (or might not) yield. Food, I have learned, is never merely a product. It’s also a process. 

This week’s parshah, Sh’mini, is known for its dietary laws, the laws of kashrut.  And though I could write at length about kashrut and Reform Judaism, I’m more interested in asking us to consider how halachic structures around eating can help us sacralize and become mindful of how we eat, elevate it from noshing to something worthy of blessing. Because serious engagement with the tradition and with the parsha calls for not just a historical critical interrogation of where the laws come from but also an acknowledgment that the laws present us with an opportunity to think deeply, and seriously about how we consume (and if we are doing so ethically). And though we ultimately may not choose to give up cheeseburgers or non-kosher meat, we might at least feel compelled to engage in a centuries old conversation about what it means to sanctify this simplest of acts.  

Jordie2For me, this has meant making an effort to know where my food comes from, and a commitment to only buying food that is organic, free-range, hormone free, or sustainably raised  (this means I eat much less meat, as it’s far more expensive this way). For others, it may mean becoming a vegetarian or vegan; but no matter what, it will mean consuming consciously, thoughtfully, in a manner that reflects our understanding of the earth – and all its inhabitants – as holy and precious in their own right. This, though not traditionally halachically observant, is halachically responsible, in keeping with the spirit of a law which asks us to bring a disciplined heart and head to what – and how – we consume.

This, in part, is what it means to eat Jewishly.

st-cover_with_seal_2B’tayavon.

Rabbi Jordie Gerson serves Temple Emanu-el Beth Sholom in Montreal. 

For more on Judaism and food, check out The Sacred Table: Creating a Jewish Food Ethic, edited by Rabbi Mary Zamore