Honey Tahini Challah

There are certain recipes I’ve seen while baking through Dessert Person that look so good, but I never want to make all the ‘cool’ ones first. This includes the Honey Tahini Challah. While this is supposed to be one of those beloved, easy homemade recipes, it took two attempts to get it right. Those two attempts have officially made me decide that olive oil is the enemy of any bread dough!

Since I’ve already made the Salted Halvah Blondies, I already had the tahini and sesame seeds I needed with other basic pantry items in this recipe. I started by warming up water in the microwave. In my first attempt at this recipe, I felt I knew what lukewarm was, so I did not bother to check the temperature. I added some instant yeast from a packet I had left from another recipe and let it puff up for five minutes.

The yeast didn’t seem to be too foamy or anything, but once a few minutes passed I whisked in honey, tahini, egg yolks, olive oil, two whole eggs and water. In another bowl, I combined the bread flour and salt. I made a well in the flour and added the wet mixture, mixing it into a dough with a wooden spoon.

It took a while to get my dough together because it was very tough. It reminded me a lot of the olive oil dough I made for the Ricotta and Broccoli Rabe Pie, so I didn’t really question if this consistency was correct.

I formed the dough into a tight ball, coated a clean bowl with olive oil and placed the dough inside. I covered it with a damp towel and let it sit for about two hours. After all that time, it still was extremely tough (I’m not sure what I was expecting to magically happen in that time). Did it let me punch through it easily like Claire suggested? No. Did it spring back when I poked my finger into it? Not at all. And yet, on I went with the recipe.

When I tried to divide the dough into three parts, it was extremely difficult. When I rolled the pieces into long pieces, it was in multiple strands, not willing to stick together at all. It looked nothing like the pictures in the book. I went from trying to make two challah braids to hoping I could get one, to realizing this was the crappiest dough ever. I got extremely frustrated. I did everything the book said to do, why was this not coming together?!

Somehow, I braided three strands together. It barely did anything in the hour during the second rising. I brushed the entire braid after that with egg wash and sprinkled on the sesame seeds. When it came out of the oven, it was kind of brown; it certainly was not the Honey Tahini Challah Bread Claire imagined for her readers.

While the bread was baking, I watched Claire’s YouTube video for this recipe. Hers turned out beautifully! The dough was soft and perfectly round! How could all of this be?!

Claire and several other people I watched make challah bread online said you can use vegetable oil instead of olive oil. After thinking further on what I should have done differently, I decided I could not let this heavy ass lump of dough be the finished product on my blog (yes, I’m superficial like that). Every time I’ve used olive oil in dough throughout this project, I’ve found it to be extremely difficult to work with. I decided to give the challah bread another try, but this time I would use vegetable oil and actual active dry yeast instead of instant yeast from a packet.

In the second round, I actually measured the temperature of the water before adding the active dry yeast. Turns out, anything beyond 25 seconds in the microwave for a cup of water is way past 105˚! This was likely a big factor in why my yeast did not do much the first time, which also may have not been very ‘alive’ since it was in a plastic bag from an opened packet. It took a while to get the water down twenty degrees before adding the yeast, but I’m glad I waited. After combining all the ingredients, including the vegetable oil, I had a beautiful, round, bouncy dough like Claire’s! It punched and poked after letting it rise! It was actually fun to split into six pieces, and braid into two challah breads. It even expanded in the second rise. I stole some of the sesame seeds from the first awful challah bread to use on these new braids, as I was now running low.

When I took them out of the oven after 29 minutes, they had the same pretzel brown glow as Claire’s. They were absolutely, spectacularly gorgeous. I am so, so happy I gave this recipe a second try, and to top it off, they made the house smell like delicious freshly baked bread.

Both my husband and I really enjoyed the second finished product. My husband added butter, I ate it without anything because it was so good. It’s fluffy and provides the level of satisfaction we all want when eating a homemade bread.

I was so tired and frustrated when this bread did not come together the first time, but the success of the second round was worth the experience. It’s becoming evident I will never stop learning as I bake, and challah bread may be one of my biggest baking lessons yet!

Here is Claire’s video on Honey Tahini Challah:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y394gJelE-U