Chocolate babka dough calculator
NY-style chocolate babka dough — buttery, egg-rich, cold-proofed overnight for clean twisting.
2 × 540 g · 51% hydration
Type how much flour you have — the portion weight recalculates.
Chocolate babka in the New York style — the Ottolenghi krantz-cake lineage via Smitten Kitchen: a buttery, egg-rich yeast dough, cold-proofed overnight, twisted around a dark chocolate filling and soaked with syrup straight from the oven.
How it works
The dough
Water 25%, sugar 19%, eggs 28% and butter 28%, with 0.8% salt and 1.2% instant yeast. Like brioche, the butter goes in after gluten development — and like brioche, the overnight refrigeration is structural, not optional: cold dough is the only dough you can twist cleanly.
Fill, roll, twist
The source filling: dark chocolate and butter melted together with powdered sugar and cocoa. Roll the cold dough thin, spread, roll up tight, then split the log lengthwise and twist the two cut-face-up halves around each other before panning (~540 g of dough per loaf).
Bake, then soak
Proof 1–1.5 hours and bake at ~190 °C for about half an hour. The defining finish: brush a simple sugar syrup over the loaf the moment it leaves the oven — the NY babka’s moist, glossy crumb is the syrup’s doing, not the dough’s.
FAQ
What does the Breads Bakery version do differently?
Uri Scheft’s famous loaf runs a milk-based dough with less butter and — per his own published shortcut — a Nutella filling. The Ottolenghi/Smitten lineage here is water-and-egg based with a from-scratch ganache-style filling. Both are the real NY thing.
Is this the same as Polish babka wielkanocna?
No — the Polish Easter babka is a tall, fluted yeast (or sponge) cake, not a twisted filled loaf. The NY babka descends from Jewish Central-European baking via New York; the name is shared, the object is not.
My twist unraveled or leaked — why?
Dough not cold enough or the roll too loose. Work straight from the fridge, roll snug, and pinch the log seam before splitting. Some chocolate lava at the pan edges is tradition, not failure.