The ultimate gluten-free oat challah

I can’t believe that it has been almost a month since I posted anything here! Between the end of camp, which meant all the kids were home, and going away on vacation that last month just flew by! Now that the kids are back in school I hope I will be able to post a bit more frequently.

The recipe that I want to share today has been a long time in the making. My oldest son stopped eating gluten in February. Since I don’t want him to feel left out I have been doing a lot of gluten-free baking to make sure that he can have whatever treats the other kids are having at school or synagogue (you may have noticed there have been more gluten-free recipes lately). I have been making gluten free oat challah almost every week since then, each time tinkering with the recipe a bit more, and I finally think I have gotten it right.

The thing about most gluten-free baking is that it does not use any of the grains that can be used in making a bread that requires the blessing hamotzi. Most of the time that is fine for us, but for shabbat I wanted to make sure that my son would be able to say hamotzi over his challah just like everyone else. So I made oat challah.

I started out by making the gluten-free oat challah that is posted on Joy of Kosher. It was fine when freshly baked but by the next day I found it was incredibly dry and crumbly. This was not ideal for serving on a Saturday for lunch! Also, it did not freeze all that well, and I wanted to be able to make a batch of challah rolls for my son to have at school and keep them in the freezer so I don’t have to make them fresh every week in time for him to take them to school.

Each time I have made this challah I have changed it just a bit more, until I have a final version that I adore. I kept the basic blend of flours the same as that original recipe but I have changed the ratio of pretty much everything else. More honey to give it extra sweetness, an extra egg yolk for added moisture, even a bit of gelatin to give it a bit more of that chew that I want in my challah. The end result does not taste exactly like traditional challah, but it is sweet and delicious in that special shabbat way. And it makes my son very happy to have his challah like everyone else.

Gluten-free challah dough is much stickier than traditional challah dough. In fact, it is more like a thick cake batter which makes it absolutely impossible to braid. That is why I absolutely adore my silicone challah baking pans. They are silicon pans shaped like a loaf of braided challah. Simply put the dough in the pan, let it rise, and it bakes up into a perfectly “braided” challah. There is also a roll pan which is what I tend to use. The rolls come out quite large, more like mini challahs rather than individual rolls, so I also bake some challah rolls in standard muffin tins for my son to take to school.

Since I make this almost every week I wanted a way to streamline the procedure so it didn’t take me so long to put it together. I now combine many batches of the dry ingredients at once and keep it in a bag in the freezer. Each recipe is 449 grams of the dry mix so all I have to do is put the wet ingredients in my mixing bowl, add the right amount of dry mix, and let the mixer run for a little while. Ten minutes of prep, a little bit of rising, and we have fresh, homemade, delicious, gluten-free challah every Shabbat. And that is a wonderful thing.