Hala bread

For each individual cuisine of the world, their own dishes are traditional, including bakery products. For example, in Italy they eat ciabatta and focaccia, Mexicans prefer tortillas, in the Caucasus it is customary to use pita bread. Residents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus use black and white bread for the daily diet, baking loaves for the festive table.

Meanwhile, among the diversity of all kinds of national bakery products, Israel's traditional types of bread deserve attention. This is matzo cake - an important component of the life of faithful Jews, and hala bread, which is prepared for the holidays.

Jewish hala bread is made on the basis of sweet yeast dough. It takes its name from the name of the Torah commandment, which should be performed when preparing dough for hala bread. By the way, this commandment is called - hala (or the department of hala), and its source is contained in the words of the Pentateuch. Despite the fact that hala bread is traditional for the cuisine of Israel, in our country today it is also in demand, gaining great popularity at the end of the 19th century.

Eating hala bread in Israel is accepted in Shabbat. And initially, by the word "hala" it was customary to understand a piece of dough that had to be pinched off when baking bread for the purpose of sacrifice and taken to the priests of the Temple. Hala bread was baked by clergy and was used by them (only they had the right to do so).

Currently, due to the Temple being destroyed and priests no longer present, this piece of dough is simply burned. Thus, in the modern world, "hala" means the eaten part of bread.

Outwardly, hala bread has much in common with a fairly common bakery called wicker, however, unlike the latter, hala does not consist of three harnesses, but of much more of them. These harnesses are intertwined like a girl's braid of hair, and then or left in this form or formed into a round product.

Today, the industrial production of bakery products does not bypass this type of bread - in our country, halas can easily be found in free sale. However, many hostesses, who are used to making homemade bread on their own, bake hot bread at home. The composition of the dough for hala bread is not much different from the ingredients used for baking dough, the difficulty lies only in the correct molding of the product.