No-frills challah is a wonderful thing, passed around the table and pulled into feathery, haphazard chunks before the meal even starts (with any spared pieces becoming French toasted the next day).
But over on our (Not)Recipes app, Rachael Strecher looked to Smitten Kitchen's Fig and Sea Salt Challah to give her weekly loaf a seasonal adaptation. (Friendly reminder that you can add links—to a source of inspiration, to a smart tip—right inside your (Not)Recipe posts.)
In Deb's recipe, she divides the dough into quarters. Before shaping them into logs, she flattens them into rectangles and spreads them with a homemade fig filling. Then, she rolls them up into snakes before looping and twisting them into an impressive round loaf. (I can tell you from personal experience that the process is messy—fig jam everywhere—but well worth it, each slice striated with pockets of sweet jam.)
Rachael made the recipe weekday- and spring-appropriate by smearing the dough rectangles with garlic scape pesto and shaping them into a more casual three-braid.
Rachael's ingenuity has us brainstorming other seasonal fillings for challah (or other enriched, braided loaves):
Just make sure that your filling is on the viscous side of the thick to runny spectrum: You don't want it leaking and dripping all over the place in the oven.
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