When the founder and CEO of Hot Bread Kitchen, Jessamyn Rodriguez, was three years old, she had a formative bread experience. Her family lived in rural Ontario, in a small town called Gananoque, hundreds of miles away from the closest Jewish bakery. They still celebrated Shabbat on Fridays and her mother, who was finishing her PhD at the time, made a challah every week for dinner.
Jessamyn doesn't have many memories from those years, but she can distinctly recall the smell of the dough after rising and how it felt to roll that dough into braids with her little hands. Jessamyn’s love of challah started with those dense, flavorful loaves.
Home-baked challah is different from the commercially produced, over-yeasted, fast challah that's now ubiquitous in many supermarkets. At Hot Bread Kitchen, her bakers use a minimum amount of yeast, and take time to let flavor develop naturally, and create a nice chewy loaf.
The Jewish Food Society was proud to gift Hot Bread Kitchen challahs to attendees of our latest event. You can purchase the challah online, sign up for a challah subscription, or try making it at home using the recipe that was published in the Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook. All sales benefit programs run by Hot Bread Kitchen, a social enterprise that creates economic opportunity through careers in food by training low-income women from around the world, incubating food businesses and creating jobs in urban areas.
