No matter how many requests we get for gluten-free, sugar-free, all the ‘frees,’ we always sell the most of our really decadent, hardcore chocolate baked goods like kokosh and rugelach - nothing sells better.” “It’s really a name we give to our kokosh that has that extra gooey chocolate filling. “The word heimishe is basically Yiddish for ‘homemade or kinda home-style,’” says Menashe Stern, part of the Stern’s Bakery family. In Germany, crumb coffee cakes, or streuselkuchen, were and are still made by sprinkling a crumb topping over a basic yeast-raised sweet dough. This stands in opposition to the “fine” cakes that were uniformly smooth in texture and filled or glazed for dessert preparations. Various Eastern European cakes would seem to become “coffee cakes” with the addition of high-sugar crumb toppings or a mixture of sugar and nuts that creates a crunchy contrast to yeasted or egg-risen cake batters. The other instance is with, specifically, the “heimishe” kokosh made by Stern’s. This is one of the few times you see a crumb topping added to such yeasted, filled cakes. There is also Czech koláče and Polish kolache - both sometimes referred to as “Bohemian buns” - that are yeasted sweet buns filled with poppyseed or fruit filling that are then topped with a crumble topping. Other Eastern European relatives of kokosh can be found in the Polish makowiec, a cake made with yeasted short dough spiral-rolled with poppyseeds and raisins that’s then baked in a log and iced. In Hungary, kalács are yeast-raised cakes the name comes from Slavic koláč, which comes from kolo, meaning circle. It is rolled with a chocolate filling into a spiral log that’s then baked golden brown. It looks more like a strudel, but the dough is yeast-raised and short, which means it has a high fat-to-flour ratio from the addition of butter. Sometimes referred to in Jewish bakeries as “chocolate-filled rolled strips,” kokosh - Hungarian for “cocoa” - is basically a mix between babka, which is often layered with chocolate, twisted and loaf-shaped, and strudel, which is a long loaf of thin pastry wrapped around a cooked filling. Because I was cooking for a large crowd, I decided to make three desserts with tangential connections to the holiday, as determined by the Google search “Yom Kippur desserts.” I ended up making a flourless chocolate cake, a crumb cake and a zwetschgenkuchen, a German tart made with Italian prune plums from a recipe by the always-reliable Jewish cookbook author Joan Nathan.
Undeterred, I set about researching, trying my best to find something that would work. I asked other Jewish friends, and they all came back with the same answer as Sam’s. I wanted to bring something unexpected besides a honey cake, which is associated more with Rosh Hashanah than Yom Kippur. The holiday requires fasting from sundown on the evening before Yom Kippur to sunset the next day. There must be something that’s traditionally eaten to mark Yom Kippur, which takes place 10 days after Rosh Hashanah and is considered the holiest day of the year in Judaism. “Anything,” he said, “there are no rules!” Because I had never taken part in any Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur meals, I asked my host and friend Sam what I should bring. Last year, I was invited to my first breaking of the fast for Yom Kippur and was asked to bring a dessert.
0 kommentar(er)
