Kneading Dough

Val always made her own challah for shabbat in Phoenix.  We used a recipe where she would use a bread-maker machine to make the dough, then braid the loaves and bake them in the oven.  But since we’ve been in Israel we haven’t had a breadmaker. So she found one recipe she had for completely handmade chocolate challah – actually a sort of flower shape where each petal is a small parve-chocolate-spread-filled little bread roll. That worked well and the kids loved it, but there’s only so many times you can have the same chocolate spread.  So we moved on to store-bought challah.  Coming from the US where store bought challah is always sort of a gamble, we figured what better place to try it again than Israel?  So we’ve tried challah from several local bakeries and stores here, even from a few delivery services.  And while there is definitely some good challah to be had here, it just isn’t the same as home made.  

So recently she found a recipe she had from a long time ago.  It was all by hand, had different stages and steps, etc, and at the time had seemed just a bit too complicated for us challah-newbies.  But now, years later and here in Israel with no bread maker and all out of options, she had no choice but to make this recipe work.  And because this recipe is totally from scratch, it involves 20 minutes of kneading the dough.  Which has become my job.  So she prepares the ingredients, mixes them up (there seem to be two different bowls, things setting, bubbling, adding eggs at some later point in the process to one of the bowls, mixing the two bowls together later on, etc) at which point I pop in, sometimes putting on some music or a podcast, and just stand there in the kitchen kneading the dough for twenty minutes. You may think, what’s the big deal, people knead dough all the time – in bakeries, at home, even kids for school activities sometimes.  But that’s missing the point.  Here I am, a year after moving to Israel, for some reason having never done this before, standing here kneading the dough that my wife prepared for the shabbat challah, all because we moved here and couldn’t take our bread maker with us, and being forced to stand here for twenty minutes so that I can take the time to actually realize what’s happening here.  It’s just a real blessing.