You Can’t Beat a (Savory) Babka
Fill your kitchen with the aroma of a freshly baked bread.
Jennifer Eremeeva / MT
With snow set to be a fixture for much of next week, what’s needed now is an absorbing project to keep us inside — preferably one with delicious results. And for that, you can’t beat a babka! A savory babka with mushroom filling in this case: cake meets bread, and breakfast meets dinner in this yeasty, eggy braided loaf, stuffed with delicious swirls of rich, umami filling.
The babka is one of Eastern Europe’s more tenacious confections, though its origins remain hotly contested. The Poles proudly claim it as their own, noting that the name comes from the Polish word for “grandmother.” That’s a nice thought, say the Italians, who beg to differ: a babka is just a Polish riff on Italian panettone, brought to Poland by the feisty, intelligent, and very wealthy Bona Sforza d’Aragona in the sixteenth century when she married the King of Poland. And the resourceful Ashkenazi Jews of Ukraine will probably just laugh all the way to the spice cupboard; they know that babka is a treat cobbled together from leftover challah dough and any fruit, nuts, or spices lying around.