Tausi Insider

The other day, I got to introduce my father to babka, a delight he had never experienced before. “I like that pretty well,” he kept saying, which sounds like faint praise but—for him—is actually rather enthusiastic. The babka loaves (one chocolate and one cinnamon) were sent by a friend as an “I hope your bones heal” gift after I recently broke my ankle, but the whole family benefited. We inhaled it all , but I wish we had saved a piece or two for French toast. What is babka? If, like my father, you are unfamiliar with babka, you should get familiar with it real quick. The yeasted Jewish bread was traditionally made with an oil-based challah dough to keep things pareve (dairy- and meat-free), and swirled with fillings, most commonly chocolate or cinnamon. Most modern babka recipes are made with enriched doughs that include dairy ingredients, and you can find babka swirled with fruit, nuts, and even cheese. A simple slice of cinnamon babka with a cup of coffee is, to me, an id...

Photo : Allie Chanthorn Reinmann Cinnamon buns are one of those desserts where there’s not much of an intermediate level. Either you enjoy making a brioche-like dough from scratch and spend hours nurturing it, or you slap a can of Pillsbury onto the cashier conveyor belt and crack open the tube at home. If you’ve ever wanted homemade cinnamon rolls but aren’t much of a bread maker, this is the hack for you. Pick up a bag of pre-made pizza dough, a small carton of heavy cream, and get rollin’. I’m not about to tell you that pizza dough and enriched doughs are the same thing, they’re definitely different. Lean doughs, like pizza dough, are made with higher gluten flours to make them chewier, and are usually enlisted for savory dishes. Enriched doughs, like brioche, use a lower percentage of gluten, and higher ratio of fats and sugars, yielding a softer bread. Pizza dough has very little fat in it, and won’t result in a passable cinnamon roll all on its own. Since we can’t mix fat dir...