Challah Bread Recipe
Challah Bread Recipe
This deep-gold, light-textured bread is traditionally served on the Jewish Sabbath and other holidays. The dough is wonderfully smooth and supple, making it an ideal candidate for braiding. The simplest way to go is a three-strand braid; but feel free to try the slightly more complex four-strand braid, or even a six-strand braid, which makes a striking presentation.
Makes 2 challah bread
Ingredients
- 1 ¼ cups warm water
- 2 tbs dry yeast
- ½ cup honey
- 2 eggs
- ¼ cup oil
- 1 tbs salt
- 4 ½ cups bread flour
- 1 egg yolk with a drop of honey to brush the bread
- Sesame seeds, poppy seeds, sunflower seeds, or everything bagel for topping
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350 F
- Combine the warm water, yeast, and honey, mix and let stand for 2 minutes to activate the yeast.
- Add the 2 eggs, oil, salt, and some of the flour, mix well.
- Add the remaining flour mixing after every cup.
- Knead until dough forms, the dough should not be sticky but malleable.
- Transfer the dough to an oiled bowl large enough for your dough to double in size, brush the dough with oil
- Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and let it rise until doubles in size, 1-2 hours. I always leave the bowl with the dough to rise in top of my range as it’s already hot.
- Prepare 2 pans, line them with parchment paper, and set them aside.
- Divide the dough into 6, shape them into long strands and braid 2 pieces of bread in 3 stands each. Transfer them into the pans.
- Let them rise for another 20 minutes
- Brush them with the egg yolk and honey mixture. Sprinkle them with the topping of your choice (sesame seeds, poppy seeds, etc)
- Bake for 30-40 minutes or until golden brown.
Russian Honey Cake
Russian Honey Cake Recipe
Russian honey cake is light, sweet, and perfectly moist. Traditionally baked in a standard round pan, but it will look fancier if baked in a bundt cake pan. Perfect with tea, coffee, matcha latte, or a cocktail.
Serves 8 to 12
Russian Honey Cake Ingredients:
- 3 eggs separated
- 1 cup sugar
- 3 tbs honey
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 cup sour cream
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- ¼ cup walnuts or any other nuts of your choice
- Butter for the pan
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350 F
- Beat egg whites with a mixer until stiff peaks form. Set aside
- In a large bowl, whisk together egg yolks and sugar until the mixture is almost white. Add the honey, baking soda, and sour cream. Mixing at low speed, gradually add flour and nuts, and mix until batter is uniform.
- Gently fold the egg whites with a spatula.
- Generously butter a bundt cake pan (or a 9 in the round pan) and pour in batter. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until golden brown
You can drizzle our lavender-infused honey or our matcha honey for extra taste
Raw Honey Benefits For Skin
Healthy Skin with Raw Honey
Raw honey is easily one of the healthiest substances available. You may already know a lot about its nutritional benefits. What you may not know, though, is how to achieve healthy skin with raw honey. Even though it’s often touted as a good part of a healthy diet, it’s also great for your skin.
What Are The Raw Honey Benefits For Skin?
Walk down the skincare aisle at any big box store, and you’ll find lots of products infused with honey. There’s a reason for that: it’s a powerhouse when it comes to skincare, and it’s far more potent in its original form. Just what can raw honey do for your skin? Take a look.
Fight the Signs of Aging: Honey works well to fight wrinkles and other signs of aging thanks to its ability to work as a moisturizer. The vitamins and antioxidants inside also help make that happen. It contains six different vitamins, including riboflavin, niacin, pantothenic acid, vitamin B6, folate, and vitamin C. Most anti-wrinkle creams contain just four vitamins and none of the antioxidants or minerals raw honey does.
Tackle Skin Problems: Additionally, honey can be used on common skin issues like acne. Honey works as an anti-bacterial, so it helps to stop the bacteria that work to create acne in the first place. It goes a bit further than that, though. It also helps to soothe the skin and reduce any redness you may see due to acne. Many people just dab a bit of honey directly on an outbreak at night to end the problem. Honey can be used all over the body, too. If you’re experiencing other problems like minor cuts and burns, you may want to try raw honey. It works as an antiseptic, and its antimicrobial properties mean you can promote healing for any type of skin issue, including fungal problems.
Daily Skin Care: Honey could also become part of your regular skincare routine. It works well for exfoliation because the organic acid helps to speed up the process of naturally shedding dead skin cells. Mixed with other ingredients like ground oats, it will likely remove those dead skin cells and eliminate the dull look your skin sometimes takes on when exfoliation is necessary. Exfoliation isn’t the only part of your skincare routine that could use an infusion of raw honey. Use it as a moisturizer, too. It helps to absorb the water from the environment around it, and because it’s hygroscopic, you’ll see real power when you combine it with other natural moisturizers like coconut oil.
Honey has long been used as part of a natural skincare routine. Before you add it to yours, though, make sure you’re using raw honey, as it provides you with more benefits than processed honey might. Raw honey is best described as honey that is taken directly from a beehive. Typically beekeepers strain the honey to eliminate beeswax, then bottle it. Processed honey (like those options you might find on grocery store shelves) undergoes quite a bit more processing, including pasteurization. Often that extra bit of processing can destroy many of the nutritional properties raw honey has.
The power of honey in your skincare routine cannot be understated. Explore just how amazing it can be when you add it to your skincare lineup now.
Is Raw Honey Good for You?
What Makes Raw Honey Good for You
Cave paintings from 7000 BC have records of beekeeping, suggesting that even thousands of years ago, people were interested in the benefits of honey. That interest certainly hasn’t waned in recent years. Now more than ever before, people are working to discover the benefits of raw honey. With so much nutritional information floating around these days, though, it can be difficult to decide what’s right for your body, especially when it comes to something as sweet and delicious as honey. So, is raw honey good for you, and if so, what health benefits can it provide?
What is Raw Honey?
If you’re unfamiliar with the term raw honey, you may need a bit of an explanation. The stuff you buy at the grocery store isn’t raw honey. It’s processed honey. The best way to think about raw honey is to imagine you could tap a beehive and have the honey run into a jar. That’s raw honey. Beekeepers extract honey directly from the honeycombs of a hive, strain it to separate it from any impurities, then bottle it. Processed honey goes through several additional steps like filtration and pasteurization before it reaches your table.
What Makes Raw Honey Good For You
While not everything marketed as the best alternative to sugar is good for you, honey truly is. Many health benefits accompany the regular consumption of honey. Maybe the most important one is that it contains lots of micronutrients your body needs to stay healthy. Inside, you’ll find potassium, iron, and zinc in tiny amounts. It’s also high in antioxidants, which have been proven to support better health. Antioxidants help your body fight cell damage that can often occur with aging and disease. Research has shown that making foods high in antioxidants part of your diet regularly may help you protect against problems like heart disease, cancer, and even diabetes.
The benefits of raw honey don’t stop there, though. If you use honey to replace regular sugar in your diet, you may be giving your heart a helping hand. A 2008 study printed in the Scientific World Journal found that in the subjects studied, regular consumption of honey helped decrease LDL cholesterol levels and increase HDL cholesterol levels. More than that, though, it also helped lower the subjects’ triglyceride levels by nearly 20%. Other studies have found that honey can reduce blood pressure as well. All of these things – high levels of LDL cholesterol, high triglyceride levels, and high blood pressure spell the real risk of serious heart problems, and honey has been shown to address each one of them.
Fighting off potential heart problems is significant effect honey can have. Still, it has also been shown to have other health benefits, particularly for those who deal with acid reflux. If you know that burning sensation in your chest or throat, you know how serious this problem can be. An article in the Indian Journal of Medical Research found that the viscosity of honey sits in the esophagus long enough to coat the mucus membrane in the back of your throat. That allows it to fight the stomach acid that may be coming back up, which can help you deal with any potential acid reflux issues you may fight regularly.
Honey has also been shown to improve athletic performance. If you’re in search of something that might help you perform at your best every time you work out, honey could be the ideal way to make it happen. Honey is packed with carbohydrates, so it offers you stable energy when you need it most. While many athletes look to sports gels to help them endure the most challenging race or workout, honey is a natural alternative that performs just as well, according to several studies.
Additionally, honey has been proven to help many people sleep better. Sleep is vital, yet thousands of people struggle to get the high-quality sleep they need each day, which can do long-term health damage. Since the Middle Ages, warm milk and honey have been a folk remedy to help people fall asleep fast and sleep deeper, and there’s a good reason for that. One researcher found that a bit of honey at bedtime can push your pancreas to reduce insulin. That mechanism helps your brain get the tryptophan you need, which may not only help you fall asleep but stay asleep much longer.
The Power of Raw Honey
So, is raw honey good for you? Absolutely. Whether you use it to replace your other sugar options or just use it to supplement your regular diet, raw honey offers you many potential benefits.
What Are Some Raw Honey Nutrients?
Raw Honey Nutrients
If you’re like many people today, you’re wondering just how powerful raw honey can be. Many are discovering its benefits, and they have been for generations. Raw honey has long been used not only as great food but as a medical treatment. It may seem like a simple source of sugar, but the reality is the nutrients found in raw honey are both surprising and powerful.
What is Raw Honey?
If you’re not familiar with the idea of raw honey, it may help to get a bit of background information. Honey is initially formed from the nectar of a flower that a honeybee’s digestive tract has processed. The honey is then stored in a hive. Not all honey is alike, though. The nutrients found inside honey depend somewhat on the flower source that it’s made from. This information is accurate for both the honey you’ll find on the shelves of your local grocery store and raw honey alike. What distinguishes raw honey from the other type, though, is the processing involved. Raw honey is extracted directly from the honeycombs of bees, then filtered through a nylon or mesh filter to help remove beeswax. At that point, it is bottled. Other kinds of honey, though, are filtered additional times, then pasteurized to destroy possible toxins. In that pasteurization process, though, many of the essential nutrients are lost.
What Nutrients are Inside Raw Honey?
Honey is actually a blend of fructose and glucose, both of which are types of sugar. The composition of honey is about 99% honey and one percent water. Inside that honey, though, you’ll find lots of nutrients. It’s about .5% protein. You can also find sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, selenium, copper, zinc, iron, manganese, and chromium. There are also several vitamins found in raw honey, including B vitamins and vitamins C and K. Keep in mind that these nutrients aren’t in honey in large amounts. Most register at just under 1%, but the presence of these alone is incredibly important. It means that you can take on some nutrition with the added sweetness.
Raw honey contains several enzymes as well as those nutrients. Inside, you’ll find amylase, which can help you digest carbohydrates. It also contains saccharase, which is used to enhance metabolism in the body. Additionally, raw honey has glucose oxidase inside, which works to normalize your body’s blood sugar.
These benefits are far from the only ones raw honey provides. It’s also packed with antioxidants, including flavonoids, phenolic acids, and glutathione. However, the amount of each of these depends a bit on the flower nectar the bees were eating when the honey was created. A good rule of thumb is that the darker the honey, the higher the overall amount of antioxidants inside. Why are antioxidants so important? Free radicals have the ability to damage your cells, and that can lead to disease. The antioxidants found in raw honey, though, stop free radicals in your body.
The Other Benefits of Raw Honey
Raw honey is packed with various kinds of nutrients, but there’s more to it than that. It also has a healthy Glycemic Index or GI. The GI number is a value that foods have been assigned based on how fast they create an increase in your blood glucose level. Foods with a lower GI usually release glucose into the body slowly. Foods with a higher GI release glucose very quickly and increase blood sugar numbers very quickly. Honey has a GI of just 19, so it releases the sugar inside very slowly, which helps to keep insulin levels low.
Raw honey is packed with nutrients and vitamins, making it an incredibly healthy part of any diet.