Vanilla Challah: REDUX
I’ve made this sucker so many times I could probably write down the original recipe off the top of my head. So this time, I’m doing things a little differently. I’ve never attempted a challah with butter. I’ve always stuck with canola oil for the fat content of this sucker, but since I had some on hand, I decided to go for a medium between vegetable and butter: coconut oil.
It’s just barely solid at room temperature, and melts with just a touch of my hand. It’s also got this intoxicatingly sweet smell of coconutty goodness. Yumm!
I also went with kneading. It was hard to mix such a huge lump of starter and my egg-vanilla-sugar-coconutoil mixture with just utensils, so i dusted up a board with some flour, and kneaded away. (Kneading is nice when you’re a little high strung)
After I saw the familiar blisters just under the surface of the dough, I popped it into a box, and put it in the fridge. I’m probably going to come home tonight, let it sit at room temperature for a little while, braid, refrigerate overnight, proof, and bake off early tomorrow morning.
What I’ve found is that bread can be very forgiving. I’m not making anything particularly finicky, and I’m not really adhering to a particular end result. So there we go. My “challah” will be what it will be, and I’m sure that even though I am making it around a busy schedule, it won’t fail me. Time isn’t a bad thing 
