Hanukkah Archives | Kosher Bread Pro

Pareve
Dairy-Free • Contains Eggs • Contains Gluten

Yield16 doughnuts

DifficultyIntermediate

Active Time40 minutes

Total Time3½ hours

BrachaMezonot

Challah doughnuts are what happens when the richest bread dough meets the deep fryer. These are not your standard sufganiyot — they use a full-bodied challah dough, extra-eggy and enriched with honey, producing a doughnut that is impossibly tender, slightly sweet, and stays soft for days.

The idea is brilliantly simple: challah dough is already one of the most indulgent bread doughs in Jewish baking. By portioning it into rounds and frying instead of baking, you get doughnuts with a delicate, bread-like interior, a thin crispy shell, and all the honeyed depth of your Friday night bread.

Fill them with jam for a classic approach, with pastry cream for elegance, or simply roll them in cinnamon sugar and eat them plain. They are magnificent any way you serve them, and they make Hanukkah (or any Tuesday) feel like a celebration.

Pareve
Oil-Based • Egg • Contains Gluten • Dairy Variation Below

Yield
16–20 donuts

Difficulty
Intermediate

Active Time
1 hour

Total Time
3–4 hours

Bracha
Mezonot

This sufganiyot recipe will make you forget everything you know about donuts. These are sufganiyot — and they carry 2,000 years of miracles in every bite.

Close your eyes and picture this: a pillow of warm, golden dough, impossibly light, yielding under the slightest pressure. You bite in and the center erupts — a bright ribbon of raspberry jam, or a slick of dark chocolate, or a cloud of silky vanilla custard. Powdered sugar drifts down your sleeve like snowfall. The kitchen smells of warm oil and sweetness and something ancient, something that connects this Hanukkah to every Hanukkah that came before.

Sufganiyot are Israel’s gift to the holiday table. While Ashkenazi Jews in the diaspora have long celebrated Hanukkah with crispy potato latkes, Israeli bakeries transformed the season into a national obsession with these filled, fried donuts — each one a reminder of the miracle of oil. The cruse that should have lasted one day burned for eight. We fry in oil to remember. We fill with sweetness to celebrate.

This recipe will give you sufganiyot that rival the best bakeries on Jaffa Road. Pillowy, never greasy. Golden, never pale. Filled to bursting, never hollow. You will never buy store-bought sufganiyot again.

This is the taste of Hanukkah. And this year, it is coming from your kitchen.