Like everyone else on the internet, I’ve been playing around with wild yeast and baking sourdough. I just finished baking my third loaf (each loaf is getting better and better!) and I thought I’d try my hand at some other sourdough goods, like sourdough babka.
Did you know that there are TWO kinds of babka out there? Everyone is in love with with chocolate babka, thanks to a very old episode of Seinfeld where he and Elaine agreed that cinnamon babka was the “lesser babka.” To be honest, I don’t watch Seinfeld, so that tidbit comes to you thanks to Mike, who also isn’t a Seinfeld fan but somehow also manages to know all the Seinfeld-y memes like the soup nazi and the chicken roaster neon sign.
Anyway, Seinfeld aside, there are two types of babka, chocolate and the lesser babka, cinnamon. Actually, do we need to back up and talk about what babka is? If you haven’t had it before it’s a super rich buttery enriched dough that’s spread with chocolate (or cinnamon), rolled up, twisted, and baked into a lovely loaf of bread-y sweet deliciousness. Babka is everywhere and those beautiful glossy twists of bread made me want to try too.
I settled on trying out the sourdough babka recipe from The Perfect Loaf because I tried his sourdough recipe a couple of years ago and it was solid. I did make a couple of changes though, namely using my Kitchen Aid mixer to do more kneading so I didn’t have to do any stretch and folds. Oh, and I also divided the recipe in half because there’s only two of us and a giant babka is a dangerous thing.
I probably should have chosen a better pan size (Mike thought I should have just used a regular loaf) but I wanted to bake in my pullman loaf pan and get super square sides. Unfortunately that didn’t quite work the way I thought it would because there wasn’t enough dough for the base and the sides didn’t really come out the way I was envisioning. It ended up more like a babka cake rather than a babka loaf.
Looks aside, this was delicious! Sweet, sticky, ribbons of cinnamon all streamed through a soft and fluffy dough. I think I’m addicted to babka baking. Now I just need to figure out the right proportions for my favorite pan. Oh, and I am probably going to work on a chocolate babka, since, you know, this is the lesser babka.
Happy babka baking friends! And happy Easter too. Hopefully it’s sweet and safe at home.
PS – I have a sourdough starter guide coming soon so all you people who don’t have starter pets, this babka can soon be yours!