First Time Making an 8 Plaited Loaf!

This week has been pretty exciting, because I’ve been a part of #TheGreatInstaBakeOff Instagram collaboration! It’s a week-long three part bake off. The first was completed with the Signature Bake; if you saw my post previously, we did a cinnamon challenge and I made the scrumptious cinnamon donuts! The second bake is the technical challenge, which for me was extremely technical!

It’s the Eight-Strand Plaited Loaf recipe. In a technical challenge in the Great British Baking show, all participants receive the same recipe to follow. We followed the recipe from the BBC website and it was pretty straight forward. However I think my strands were a little too soft and some were too skinny and some were fat (eh, oh well). But it was an awesome experience and first technical bake I’ve really ever challenged myself to do, other than a croissant! There is a lot of patience and following directions in order to make the plaited loaf, but it was worth it!!

You start with a simple dough recipe, and weigh out 8 strands equally (as possible). The steps are outlined in the link above, but it’s a repeated step process until your strands are all the way pinched at the bottom.

You then have to pinch at the top and it’s like braiding…but way more complicated!

All said and done, this what the pre-baked product looked like:

Into the oven! It was hard to tell when the bake was done because my crust was pretty tough, so I might have put it in a tad too long. But, the end result looked pretty nice!

I’d like to try a challah plaited loaf one day, perhaps later this fall/winter. Braiding bread was a first time for me, and now I’m excited to try more. Have you make a plaited loaf before? Suggestions on flavoring a plaited loaf?

Stay tuned, one more final post for the week for the instagram collaboration!

Rina