Challah Results

So, as per my previous post, I made challah. I decided to try to make it sweeter so that it could be eaten w/o adulteration by adding some honey and chopped prunes into it.

I prepared the dough as indicated in the recipe. Added the honey in during the initial mixing process, then set the dough aside to rise. During the first rise, I chopped some prunes up using my hand blender's chopper accessory, and then soaked the chopped pieces in water to plump them. This turned out to be an error in order. The soaked prune pieces got really waterlogged rather than plump, and carried too much water with them into the dough. Plus, they were chopped too fine so they lacked texture. I should've plumped whole prunes and then chopped them with a knife by hand.

After adding the watery prune mass into the dough, the dough got really wet and sticky, so I had to knead it out a bit by hand with more flour to get it back into shape. Then, I manually rolled and stretched it into one long snake that I looped around into a round loaf. Then, the second rising, an egg wash, and into the oven.

Overall, the challah came out edible, but not as great as I had hoped in a number of respects. Problems were:

• Not as sweet as I wanted probably due to overwashing of prunes and not enough honey
• Loaf much tougher than I wanted

I have two suspects for why the loaf was too tough:

• Too much kneading (especially after watching the "Dr. Strangeloaf" episode of Good Eats)
• Mistake where I used 100% bread flour instead of the specified mix of AP and bread flour

AB took the dough out of the hook while it was much wetter than mine. I added flour until the dough was much less sticky, although I was still in the bounds of the recipe. Both of my suspected errors would lead to too much gluten formation, which would lead to a tougher loaf.

I also was able to consume only 1/3rd of the loaf, part with dinner and part as french toast the following morning. Then I had to leave town and froze the unconsumed portion. It remains to be seen whether or not it will survive the cold.