DISASTER BAKING #6: All-Chocolate, No-Clutter Babka to Keep Us Tender
Dear Disaster Bakers,
Over the weekend, I rewatched Call Me by Your Name, a movie that I loved the first time and that this time came to me like a revelation; divine. I saw it at the Paris Theater when it came out, and it felt like an event. The lakes! The romance! The shorts! The peach! This time, it felt like I'd just submitted to an emotional MRI. It was incredible.
All I know is I listened to Sufjan Stevens on repeat for the next 36 hours and hovered on the brink of tears the whole time. At some point I decided to scan a cache of saved texts. I wanted to detect a trace of Oliver and Elio in them. I did not find that. Instead I found a lot of desperation that made me want to be buried alive. (I said what? Did I think that made me sound cool to him?) The embarrassment was so total it dredged up repressed memories from the deep, like the time in first grade I walked past a crush in some verbal dispute and said, "Now, now. Don't fight over little ol' me." (I have deleted and rewritten this anecdote six times. You're welcome for this radical openness.)
I soon retreated to the safer ground of Sufjan. Visions of Gideon, not Visions of Mattie. We're all better for it.
The plan is to make a sequel to this movie, which André Aciman has said he will do. Still I hope it doesn't work out. I just want this one, preserved in amber like a lemon. Here to rip me open and make me feel even when the planet is more dried out than Moon Juice Green Fermented Seed Crisps and "Let's Do Crimes" is added to the formal GOP platform in 2020. These are dire times, and I can't stomach another Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde.
I've become so inured to the worst news; the corruption, the climate, conflagrations in the media business. It was such a relief to just marinate in sadness and pine for adolescent romance. Mafalda! Hug me!
If I can, I recommend getting cracked open like this. Go ahead, give in. It keeps us tender. We hear a lot now about hard conversations, bridging divides. And OK! I get it. Did I not submit to over a dozen periods of Talmud class per week in high school? Do I not know the value of discourse? I did and I do. What I don't get:
Relationships based on shared "interests," instead of shared values. If I needed to find people who had the same hobbies as I do, I'd join another Bravo TV Facebook group.
Performative Online Behavior™️. In other words, I recommend we spend zero minutes on Twitter both when a mediocre famous man dies and when an article developed in a lab to incite a social media bonfire is published. (Can an entire newsletter be a subtweet? We're close.)
People who think baking bread is a neutral, non-ideological practice, which someone seemed to suggest in a certain viral conversation. As if who we feed and what we choose to nourish aren't political declarations. And no we will not discuss the piece here because we want to be distracted from hellscapes, not burned alive in them.
I suppose I'm not so interested in that old chestnut; let's break bread together. If you're new to this newsletter, that's not what we do here. I bake because I like what happens around banana bread and tea and wine. (I also like it because it can sometimes help to focus on measurements in grams and ounces, instead of the senseless void that is the Internet, a place where I go to baste my brain with hot melted garbage until the surface is niceeeee and golden. Mmmmm.)
I can't have dinner with someone who looks out at the world and doesn't see what I see. How are we supposed to eat if she thinks a plate is a hat? Or a fork is a gun? Or the soup is a caravan or sexual assault is a bad date?
On the first night of Chanukah, I made dinner for 30 people. I had so much to do I Disaster Baked™️ for the entire 12-hour period that preceded it. This is the true miracle of Chanukah—that I didn't see all the bad takes until later. I hosted it at my parents' house, because I live in one room and I needed several to pull this off. My dad washed about 600 dishes and made pasta and showed off his trinkets to a ravenous crowd. My mom delivered a speech that was the ideal speech length; two minutes, ten seconds. (When it was over, Jason cleared the table and folded up all the chairs. He also contributed Dunkin Donuts beer, which made at least 22 percent of the guests laugh. Ladies, he is OFF THE MARKET.)
We had two kinds of latkes and warm chickpeas snuggled up with smoked paprika and braised spinach. We had mushrooms. More potatoes. Farro with parmesan and greens, plus several glug of olive oil. Mini frittatas. And then for dessert I made giant jelly donut cakes and a pair of babkas, a la Yotam Ottolenghi. Someone took this photo of me, and it's a better memoir than I'll ever write. The babka dough pretends to be hard to work with, but it doesn't have a lot of secrets. Add a lot of butter. Keep it cold. When it's finished it's 100 percent molten and ooier and gooier than the haters believed possible.
All Chocolate Babka, Decluttered
Servings: 2 loaves; decide how many slices that is and never apologize. Maybe it's four. We don't judge.
Distractability: 7
Scratchpad: Three points for the time-intensive, but not labor-intensive dough. One point for the scent of melted butter and chocolate. One point for the use of a rolling pin, which will help direct some of the pent-up anticipation we all feel as we await more indictments in the Mueller investigation. One point for the novel twist exercise, which requires some concentration and is guaranteed to calm the nerves that Michael Avenatti jangled. Avenatti? More like AveNOtti.
Notes: This is Yotam Ottolenghi's "krantz" cake, which I first found in his Jerusalem cookbook and adapted just the tiniest bit here. It's since been made across all corners of the Internet. Deservedly so. It's delicious. Ottolenghi includes some lemon zest in the dough and nuts and extra sugar in the ganache-ish filling. I nixed all that, as I prefer babka to taste like a pain au chocolat has entered into a committed relationship with a challah; no distractions.
Ingredients:
Dough
4 1/4 cups (530 grams) all-purpose flour, plus a little extra for dough roll-out
1/2 cup (100 grams) granulated sugar
2 teaspoons instant yeast, not to be confused with active dry. (One of those supermarket packets has a 1/4ish teaspoon more than 2 teaspoons, but that's fine. No need to measure more precisely.)
1 teaspoon salt
3 extra large eggs
1/2 cup water, plus a little extra,
2/3 cup unsalted butter (150 grams) at room temperature and cut into tablespoons. (Sometimes it doesn't matter. I flout the rules and no one is the wiser. This time let butter come to room temperature or risk getting into a big spat with the stand mixer.)
Neutral oil, to grease the bowl
Filling
4 1/2 ounces (130 grams) dark chocolate or around 3/4 cups chocolate chips
1/2 cup (120 grams) unsalted butter
1/2 cup (55 grams) powdered sugar
2/3 cup (60 grams) cocoa powder
Syrup
1/3 cup water
6 tablespoons (75 grams) granulated sugar
To-Do List:
Make the dough. Now before we get started here, let me just level up and admit that I made these at my parents' apartment and so I had a mixer. (Spon me, KitchenAid!) It is possible to make this babka with your own two hands; I've done it before. When it comes time to mix the dough, know that what follows is what it would feel like to do the arm series at FlyWheel 10 times in a row. OK. Back to the recipe. Tip flour, sugar, yeast, and salt in the bottom of the bowl of a stand mixer, use a fork or whisk to combine.
Attach a dough hook, add eggs and water. Mix until the dough starts to come together. I needed to add an extra two tablespoons of water to get the dough where I wanted it to be; use some discernment. It does not need to be smooth, but it does need to be more uniform in texture than the skin on Donald Trump's face.
Then add the butter, a tablespoon or two at a time, until it's incorporated into the dough. Fire up the mixer to medium speed and mix for 10 minutes. Set a timer and leave. Read a magazine. Do a foot scrub or a face mask. Call a pal.
After 10 minutes, the dough should be much silkier and start to wind up around the dough hook. If it's sticking to the bowl, add another tablespoon of flour or two.Lift the dough out of the bowl with one hand. With the other, spread a tablespoon or so of neutral oil around. Put the dough back in the bowl and cover with plastic. Move to the fridge and leave it there for at least 8 hours, ideally 12.
After it's risen overnight, the dough will have expanded but not gotten that poofed or floofed. This is not a delicate dough. It'll feel like a brick. That's fine. Keep it in the fridge for now.Make the filling. Melt butter and chocolate until smooth, either in the microwave or in a double boiler on the stovetop. Stir in powdered sugar and cocoa to form a spreadable paste. Mine was a bit thin so I added equal parts powdered sugar and cocoa until it was closer to the texture of peanut butter. Let it cool, but leave it on hand.
Prepare pans. Butter two 9-by-4-inch loaf pans. Line the bottom of each with a rectangle of parchment paper.
Roll out the dough. Take the dough out of the fridge and divide it. Leave one half on a work surface, and return the other to the fridge to chill. In general, I like to roll dough out on parchment paper, taped down to a table. I find it's easier than attempting to clear counter space in a New York kitchen. Go ahead; just tear off a ginormous piece. Think: smaller than Priyanka Chopra's 75-foot train; bigger than Mitch McConnell's moral compass by a large margin. Most of the time I then sprinkle some flour, put the dough down in the center, add some more flour, and rip off another piece of parchment to put on top. But with this recipe, I found it much easier to roll it out without that top sheet of parchment. Go with God.
Whatever the setup, roll the dough into a rectangle, around 10 inches wide and 12 to 14 inches in length. TBH, it's almost impossible to fuck this up. Roll it out into about as large a rectangle as is reasonable; not too thin.Assemble loaves. Spread half of the chocolate mixture over the dough, leaving the tiniest border all around. Roll the dough up, from the side closest to you to the farthest one. Seal the coil with a little bit of water, if needed. Put the roll in the freezer for 10 minutes. That'll make the next part much easier. Repeat all this with the second piece of dough, which reminder is in the fridge. Trim the uneven ends of the rolls; maybe a 1/2 inch off of each.
Take the first loaf out of the freezer, and slice it down the middle lengthwise. Put the two halves next to each other and pinch the tops. Then twist the pieces, crossing one over the other. (See photo above.) Transfer the twist into one of the prepared pans. No one will care if the twist isn't perfect or if chocolate is streaming out everywhere. Repeat with the second loaf.
Cover both with a damp paper towel and let rise for 60 to 90 minutes at room temperature.Bake cakes. Heat the oven to 375°F. Remove paper towels, and place both loaves in the middle of the middle rack. Bake for 30 minutes. I checked at 20, and it was sorely undercooked. The loaves are done when a tester (or a toothpick, if you're budget like me) inserted into the babka comes out with no resistance and no par-baked dough stuck to it. (Errant traces of melted chocolate are, of course, just fine.)
Gild the lily. While babkas are in the oven, simmer sugar and water for the glaze until the sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and let cool a bit. As soon as the babkas are out, drizzle the glaze over both. It seems like a lot, but it's not. *Twitter voice* LET THAT SINK IN. Drizzle and then drizzle some more. Let the babkas cool or just rip to pieces and devour. I won't tell. The babkas keep on the counter for just under a week, still as delicious as ever. Or freeze until the Mueller report drops.
DistractiLinks
"Thank U, Next" has a video!
Where will the relentless march of fluke end?!
R. Eric Thomas wrote an article for ELLE.com headlined "Is It Legal For Ed Sheeran to Dress Like This in Front of Beyoncé?" I consulted several friends in law school, and the answer is 100 percent no. In violation of the law! A crime! Arrest him!!
Babka seem hard? How about some bath recipes?
Some parents now eat lunch with their children at school. Please help! The kids are not alright and neither are the adults!!!!!
Fork over That Dough
It's tradition in my family that on the eighth night of Chanukah we make donations to our preferred causes instead of exchanging gifts. This time, I'm consulting Nick Kristof's reputable column. Path sounds like a worthwhile option.
I've also renewed my subscription to WNYC, the only line item on my credit card bill that I'm happy to see each month. Richard Hake, UR MY HERO.
Oh, and
A bunch of people are new here, thanks to the fine people at Of a Kind who put me in their cultish 10 Things newsletter and gave me this endorsement. Welcome!
Isn't that nice?
Also, if you've made it to the bottom of this email, IOU a black and white cookie. In the meantime, please send recommendations, feedback, and worthwhile tiramisu recipes to disasterbaking@gmail.com. I need cloud-like and a litttttttttle bitter. No grit. All silken mascarpone and tons of alcohol. TY. ILY.