Breads Bakery’s Djerban Dairy Dill Bread for Shavuot

When Uri Scheft, the baking mastermind behind Tel Aviv’s Lehamim Bakery and, more recently, New York City’s renowned Breads Bakery (which devoted Poppy and Prune readers may recall as the winner of my 2018 NYC hamantaschen challenge), was researching his excellent cookbook Breaking Breads, he visited the island of Djerba, Tunisia.

Home to one of North Africa’s last surviving Jewish communities—and one of the oldest in the world, dating 2500 years back—Djerba is a rare locale where Jews and Muslims continue to live peacefully as neighbors. (Fun fact: Djerba is thought to be the real-life inspiration for the Land of the Lotus Eaters in Homer’s Odyssey.)

The community’s majestic La Ghriba (meaning “strange” or “miraculous”) synagogue, dating back 2000 years, is believed to be Africa’s oldest. Djerba is a popular Lag BaOmer pilgrimage site, with throngs of Jewish pilgrims descending upon the island in veneration of the second-century Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai.

To learn about the island’s bread-baking traditions, Scheft visited Djerba’s communal Jewish oven, or kusha. This is one of the few Jewish communities still reliant on a communal oven, to which members bring their challot for baking in preparation for Shabbat each week.

“Every woman has to make her challah a little different from the others, so that she can identify it when it comes out of the oven,” Scheft reports, and so there are loaves shaped into fish, flowers, braids, hands, and more.

In this Friday, Oct. 30, 2015 photo, a boy heads home with freshly baked Challah, a special Jewish bread, at the beginning of Shabbath, at Hara Kbira, the main Jewish neighborhood on the Island of Djerba, southern Tunisia. (AP Photo/Mosa’ab Elshamy)

Traditional Djerban Shabbat breads are “water challot,” made without eggs and with little sugar and fat. Scheft’s riff is far more decadent, and the inclusion of dairy (in the form of butter and yogurt) makes this a perfect bread for Shavuot.

Scheft adds another twist with the addition of dill, a popular herb in Tunisian cuisine. The original recipe calls for a whopping two cups (!) of dill, which seemed a bit much—I enjoy dill in moderation but find the flavor can easily get overwhelming. I cut the quantity down to ½ cup in my variation, but if you are a hardcore dill lover feel free to up it.

This is a more complex recipe than my usual, and I found the shaping technique quite tricky to master. Mine didn’t come out looking anything like the photos in Breaking Breads—the loaves, based on a traditional Djerban shape known as kishlaya, are meant to resemble flowers; mine came out more like deformed cogs—but even as ineptly formed as mine were, they still made for a dramatic and unusual presentation.

And, of course, they were delicious. This dill bread was a big hit with my coworkers, a notoriously tough crowd—usually when I bring my baked goods into work, there are leftovers for me to take home at the end of the day, but a full loaf of the dill bread vanished in the space of a single workday.

The version below is slightly adapted from Uri Scheft’s recipe in Breaking Breads.

Dill Bread

Makes 3 loaves

Dough

¾ cup cool water

2 ½ teaspoons active dry yeast

6 ¾ cups bread flour (plus extra)

1 tablespoon fine salt

¾ cup whole milk yogurt

5 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 small onion, finely chopped

½ cup fresh dill fronds, finely chopped

Egg Wash

1 large egg

1 tablespoon water

1 pinch fine sea salt

Combine the water and yeast in the bowl of a stand mixer and whisk until the yeast has dissolved. Add the flour, sugar, salt, yogurt, and butter pieces.

Attach the dough hook and knead on low speed until the dough comes together, 1 to 2 minutes (if, after 2 minutes, the dough has dry spots at the bottom of the bowl or the dough looks very wet, add more water or flour as needed). Once the dough comes together nicely, continue to mix on low speed for 3 minutes. Then increase the mixer speed to medium and knead until the dough looks shiny and smooth, about 5 minutes.

Stretch and fold the dough, then let it rise: Lightly flour a work surface and set the dough on it. Lightly flour the top of the dough. Take one corner of the dough and stretch the dough until it tears, then fold it on top of the center. Give the dough a quarter turn and continue the stretching/folding/turning for 2 minutes.

Use a bench scraper or chef’s knife to cut the dough into 12 pieces, and return the pieces to the mixer bowl (this helps incorporate the onion and dill easily). Add the onion and dill, and knead on low speed just until they are well incorporated, about 1 minute.

Transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface and fold again, giving it about 4 turns. Place the dough in a lightly floured large bowl and cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a damp towel. Set it aside at room temperature until the dough has doubled in volume, about 1 hour.

Divide and shape the dough: Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface and divide it into 3 equal pieces. Firmly press down on each piece of dough, and then pull it to make a 9-by-5-inch rectangle with a short side facing you.

Fold the top edge a quarter of the way down and use the heel of your hand to seal the edge to the bottom part of the dough. Repeat 3 more times to make a cylinder. Repeat with the remaining pieces of dough. Use your hands to roll each piece to form a 20-inch-long cylinder. Then cover them with a clean kitchen towel and let them rest for 15 minutes.

Roll and shape the dough again, then let the dough proof: Flatten each cylinder to a rectangle again and repeat the process, folding the top down by a fourth, using the heel of your hand to seal the edge, then repeating 3 times to make a cylinder. Now use your hands to roll each cylinder to make a 40-inch-long rope. Use scissors to snip diagonal slits three-quarters of the way through the dough at 1-inch intervals. Coil the snipped rope into a spiral shape overlapping to create a tall pyramid-like shape and set it on a parchment paper–lined sheet pan.

Repeat with the other 2 ropes, fitting 2 coils onto one of the sheets (you might have to refrigerate 1 coil of dough while the first 2 bake if your sheet pans aren’t large enough to accommodate 2 loaves on one pan). Pull on each of the segments to separate them from one another, cover the sheet pans with a kitchen towel, and set them aside in a warm, draft-free spot until the dough jiggles slightly when tapped, 1½ to 2 hours (depending on how warm the room is).

Set a rimmed sheet pan on the oven floor (or, if not possible, on the lowest oven rack). Adjust the oven racks to the upper-middle and lower-middle positions, and preheat the oven to 350°F.

Make the egg wash by whisking the egg, water, and salt together in a small bowl. Use a pastry brush to lightly coat each loaf with egg wash.

Place one sheet pan on the upper rack and the other on the lower rack, pour ¼ cup of water into the pan on the bottom of the oven, and quickly close the oven door. Bake for 12 minutes. Then rotate the bottom sheet pan to the top and the top to the bottom, and continue to bake until the loaves are browned, 5 to 8 minutes longer.

Remove from the oven and let cool on the sheet pans before serving.

Sources: Breaking Breads (Uri Scheft, 2016); “In Pictures: Tunisia’s Ancient Jewish Community,” Haaretz (the Associated Press, November 25, 2015); “The Jewish Palate: The Flavors of the ‘Island of Dreams,’” the Jerusalem Post (Dennis Wasko, December 27, 2010); “A Perfect Day on Djerba, Tunisia’s Island of Coexistence,” Lonely Planet (Katie Nadworny, March 2018); “A Twist on Challah for Hanukkah,” the New York Times (Julia Moskin, December 2, 2015)