I made a Babka

When I was a rising Junior in College doing a summer term I decided to go off the meal plan and start learning how to cook. When I first got to college the most I could do in the kitchen was make cereal, and toast. While I was on the meal plan I learned how to make pasta.

My mom was pretty worried that I'd go hungry in college. One of the things she did for me was prep a recipe book that I ultimately never referenced. My mom did teach me how to make rice. She's incredibly skilled! Even knowing how to make rice in the microwave, and preset it so that the microwave would start before she got home from work.

Pretty ambitiously when I first started cooking I bought a whole chicken and cooked it. I remember making chicken for my roommate once, and due to my lack of knowledge realizing only later that I had served him undercooked chicken. Thankfully we never got sick.

A huge help in my cooking journey has been Mark Bitman's How to Cook Everything. The book is very instructional. It shows you how to be creative and alter recipes. I've managed to convert other friends into fans of this book, and I have some go to recipes from the book which include:

• Cheese straws
• Apple Pie (including the crust)
• Pizza dough
• Oatmeal cookies
• Brownies

Cooking bonded me super closely to a longtime friend from college. Once we made chocolate chip cookies, but we didn't have a baking sheet so we just stuffed the whole dough into a class pyrex and baked it in there. To this day I still mix all my doughs by hand. There's not a lot of room in my place to justify having a kitchen aid, but my friend has upgraded to one.

Sometimes people would ask me how I learned to cook, and one of the first questions would be if I learned from my mom. I would always say I learned to cook, because my mom was bad at cooking. Skills aren't static, and my mom says she's a way better cook now, and I would tend to agree. Plus, what she was doing before was amazing! She would work a full time job. Run home and prepare a meal for the 4 of us. It was really only on Sundays when she wouldn't cook a meal and that would make me mad. As a basis for comparison though if I am "cooking" a meal it may be mixing tofu and rice, or eggs and rice. My meals would've outraged the younger me. Cooking was also not something my mom was passionate about it. It was a chore she had to do. It didn't make sense to go out to eat. We weren't going to have t.v. dinners and no one else was going to cook. Due to this disinterest in cooking she learned to be efficient.

Anyway at this point I'm like those annoying online recipes that take forever to get to the recipe. An acquaintance I know recently started a work trial at Bread's who apparently has the best Babka. For whatever reason I felt drawn to make a Babka. I feel like I didn't know what Babka was until I arrived to NYC. Surprisingly, I went for an online recipe instead of the tried and true Mark Bittman. This is because since moving I gave away the book, and haven't purchased a new copy. This acquaintance also didn't get his work trial renewed so this allowed me to avenge him!

The instructions around forming the bread were pretty confusing, but besides that the recipe turned out pretty well! Even though baking is supposed to be more of a science than cooking when I bake I approximate. The true bakers do things with a scale / by weight instead of using units like a cup. Sometimes I bake in that way.

Thankfully the recipes are often pretty robust, so you don't need to perfectly measure exactly one cup and scrape off the top with a knife to ensure the measurement is correct.

I've been more drawn to baking, because I think the stakes are lower. If you ruin a meal it's pretty sad but if you ruin dessert it's not as bad. Plus, it's easier to please people with something that has sugar, or in other words people often like sweets. An interesting insecurity I have with making food is around sharing it. Even though I am offering something which is often good to someone I still worry they might not like it, or it can reflect poorly on me. I've continued trying to bond with my neighbors so I offered them some babka and unfortunately they denied me.

The recipe yielded 3 loaves at least for me (two small and one large) I was worried I'd be stuck eating all of them so I ended up being pretty eager on the giving away. I gave a friend a half loaf. My girlfriend and her roommates a whole loaf, and I shared a half loaf with my tango class. In some ways it's also miraculous that people accept the food. I mean free food and sweets is amazing, but people might have a strict diet.

If you do want to make the babka, plan ahead because you have to let the dough rise overnight after it's made. You could probably make the frosting, the syrup, and the dough all beforehand. Then you assemble the frosting with the dough, and let that rise for another 2 hours. It would be nice if we had a medium to more effectively communicate / surface the upfront time investments to cooking. Usually you have to figure out the time you wait for bread to rise deep within the recipe.

Maybe I'll make this again. It was pretty tasty, and in the end I ended up wanting more babka since I was probably too eager in giving it away.