If you spot Scott Wiener in New York City, he’s likely running between pizzerias leading fellow pizza lovers on his popular tours. He’s the type of person who researches old ovens around the city and might pull a can of tomatoes out of his bag to help illustrate a point about what makes a proper pizza.
On certain days, he also travels with a loaf of freshly baked challah from his home in his bag, sharing the loaves with friends or the pizzaioli he visits on his rounds. Each loaf is a gift. His challah baking started after his cousin Jordan’s bar mitzvah in 2013. “It was one of those funny synagogues where you don't read from the Torah,” Scott explains. Instead, Jordan read a report about Jewish bread and gave out recipe cards with the title “Jordan’s Favorite Challah.” Scott took the card and realized he hadn’t baked challah since he was 7 years old. He was, however, already an avid bread baker, exploring what baking could teach him about pizza. (For Scott, everything comes back to pizza.)
A month or so after the bar mitzvah, Scott made Jordan’s recipe. As he continued to bake challah, he tweaked it to achieve the taste and texture he was looking for. “I want it to be eggy and a medium density, the outside shiny and sweet. The feeling of your mouth compressing it, it’s like a warm hug on a cold day after you’ve been shoveling the driveway,” he says.
He isn't certain where Jordan picked up the recipe he shared at his bar mitzvah, but Scott believes he isn’t the first person in his family’s lineage to bake the bread. Both sides of his family are from Eastern Europe, “right in that area between Russia and Poland,” Scott says. So challah, is “very much the type of food that’s in our roots.”
Still, there’s some debate about what makes the perfect challah in his family. Scott’s father “really likes dry challah,” he explains. “So when we are all together, we have to get two loaves. I bake a loaf and we get a [dry] loaf for him.”
As for the pizzeria staff he visits on his rounds, the challah is a treasured gift. “The Italians love the sweet bread — and to schmear Nutella on it,” Scott adds. While Rosh Hashanah traditionally calls for honey, we will follow their lead next month when the new year arrives and schmear Nutella on our challah.
