Baking a Three-Strand Challah Bread Loaf

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Karen for Expert Village now I'm going to show you how to make a free strained braided challah loaf. Our dough has risen for about a hour it has double in bulk. I see we have a nice soft dough here, this receipt yields 2 loaves so I'm going to cut that in half and we are going to set this aside and this one we would make a 3 strand loaf out of. Let's start by punching out the air and then we cut this into 3 equal pieces. Okay you can dust the surface with a little flour, I'm going to roll these pieces. We would start by making a uniform log and then just sort of squeeze down and pull out the ends so you would end up with something that is fat in the middle and skinny on the outside. We would make each strand the same first nice and even and then squish down and out the sides and there is our last one. We are also pushing out the air as we do this and we would squeeze those ends so we have fat in the middle and skinny on the sides. Now we would put our 3 strands together at one end. I'm going to turn it this way and then you simply alternate in the middle and in the middle taking the outside strand and placing it in the middle and the outside strand and placing it in the middle and continue this on until you come to the end. You can see by having the strands that are fat in the middle and skinny on the ends you end up with a nice shape loaf. We are just going to touch the ends under like that and we would place it on a pan a sheet pan with a little baking paper on it and we would let that rise for about a half of hour. Let's put some plastic wrap over it to keep it moist and it won't form a crust over the top. If it forms a crust over the top the dough would crack when baking. We would let that rise for a half a hour. "