Shannon Sarna
Thursday, September 22 at 12:00 PM via Zoom

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Modern Jewish Baker: Challah, Babka, Bagels & More is an essential cookbook for beginner bakers, or those looking for a new take on Jewish breads and pastry. Sarna, editor of the popular food blog The Nosher, pulls from her Jewish and Italian roots to provide a new perspective on classic Jewish baked goods. She combines traditional recipes with interesting flavor profiles, many of which are not often found in Jewish baking. The results are sweet and savory goods that are part familiar, part unexpected, and fully delicious.

The cookbook is divided into sections building off of seven basic recipes: challah, babka, bagels, rugelach, hamantaschen, pita bread, and matzah. Sarna, acknowledging that baking is as much about precision — type of flour, rise times, proportion of ingredients — as it is about intuition, provides the baker with a combination of strict instruction and loose guidelines for technique. 

Once the basic recipes have been mastered, Sarna’s creative variations on toppings and fillings — Pesto and Goat Cheese Stuffed Challah, Onion Jam Babka, and Pesto Parmesan Rugelach, to name a few — are just a starting place for inspiration, and what sets this cookbook apart from similar ones. Make-ahead strategies and suggestions for using leftovers are a nice nod to the modernization of the baking process.

Recipes are accompanied by step-by-step instructional photos for braiding, folding and shaping the various doughs, ensuring that the food’s visual presentation is as good as the flavor. The shiny loaves come out of the oven looking like they came straight from the bakery. A clean, easy to read lay­out and beautiful photography by Veronica Sage McAvoy complete the book.

Sarna provides the reader with the confidence and creative inspiration to improvise on their own. With this book as a guide, and a few simple ingredients and tools, any­one can confidently try their hand at being a modern Jewish baker.

Click here* to purchase Modern Jewish Baker: Challah, Babka, Bagels & More
*For each purchase using the link above, the synagogue receives a small commission.

Shannon Sarna is founding editor of The Nosher, the widest-reaching website dedicated to Jewish food, which is part of the 70 Faces Media group. Shannon grew up in upstate New York immersed in performance and music as well as surrounded by diverse culinary experiences: Her Sicilian American mother loved to bake, her Ashkenazi Jewish father loved to experiment, and her grandfather was a food chemist who patented Tang, among other products. Her writing and recipes have been featured in Bake from Scratch Magazine, Taste of Home Magazine, Parade Magazine, Food52, The Kitchn, Tablet Magazine, JTA News, New Jersey Monthly Magazine, Vine­pair, and Modern Loss. She graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, with a degree in comparative government and Spanish language and literature and lives in South Orange, New Jersey, with her husband, three children, two rescue dogs, and a bunny named S’mores. Her first cookbook, Modern Jewish Baker: Challah, Babka, Bagels & More, was released in September 2017 by Countryman Press.
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