bread, braid

[book cover in the likes of this book.]

haha, made challahs with tiffany. it's the braided bread made from an enriched dough. i never got down to making the recipe in my american book; tiffany used a recipe for part wholemeal - part white flour dough from peter reinhart.
she brought over some soaker (the brown thing) and biga (the yellow thing) for the dough.
kneading everything together into the final dough. i think enriched doughs come together easier than lean doughs, so she had an advantage already. or maybe it was the biga prepared overnight.
three inches? ten inches? dividing the dough into half, then six from one half and eight from the other half. haha because tiffany wanted to do a six-strand braid, and i wanted to try a one-, three-, and four-strand braid.
that's tiffany doing the six-strand braid. (6 over 1), 2 over 6, 1 over 3, 5 over 1, 6 over 4...
skip a few photos, and all the braids are done! the fattest one is the six-strand, then behind it is the four-strand, followed by the three-strand, and the tiny one in the corner is the single-strand. applying an egg wash on the dough, and then sprinkling sesame seeds after that.
tada! three of the challah loaves! the egg wash somehow didn't produce a colour so attractive, but the breads turned out surprisingly nice. i say surprisingly because i never liked bread made with wholemeal flour.
but this was soft, fluffy and nice, as you can see from the songle-strand braid that tiffany couldn't wait to cool down before tearing apart.
the underside of the loaf. some parts stuck to the parchment, and got torn off a little. otherwise, it's just right.

and now, for some challah entertainment that we found on youtube, an alligator challah: