Sourdough Babka Recipe | A gorgeous and simple sweet bread

Making bread with a sourdough starter is usually lean bread. Don’t get me wrong, those are great. I love a wonderful sourdough bread with a crunchy crust, a chewy crumb, great tang, and a super developed taste. Sometimes you’d like something else. Something sweet. Something chocolaty. This is my recipe for a sourdough babka with a chocolate filling.

Baking enriched doughs with a sourdough starter is a bit next level. At the beginning of my sourdough career, I had a hard time with these types of doughs, simply because I underestimated how long you need to ferment a dough like that. So follow the instructions on proofing, because that is imperative to get a wonderful result.

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Babka? What is that?

Babka was developed in the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe in the early 19th century, where leftover challah dough was rolled up with jam or cinnamon and baked with the challah.

Before the end of the 1950s babka was largely unknown outside of Poland. At that point, European-style bakeries in the US and Israel started baking babka and they gained some traction. The chocolate babka was probably invented around this time, but it’s not known for certain.

In the early 2010s babka gained popularity and spread across the US. This resulted in many different babkas with meat, savory seasonings, and many different sweet varieties.

The babka that I am featuring in this article is a chocolate babka, but you can certainly freestyle it and put whatever you prefer inside the dough. For instance, meats, seasonings, and cheeses.

What makes up this sourdough babka recipe?

Vitals

Total weight	1057 grams
Pre-fermented flour	11.1%
Hydration	59.7%
Yield	1 small babka

The dough

The dough in this sourdough babka is a wonderfully enriched dough with egg, milk, sugar, and butter. The flour used in this recipe is all-purpose flour for a wonderfully tender crumb. since it’s baked in a pan it doesn’t require a lot of gluten development.

The estimated hydration is about 60% which should result in a supple, tacky, but not sticky dough, that’s easy to work with. The inoculation is 25% which is a bit higher than the “industry standard” of 20%, to promote a faster fermentation. Enriching the dough does retard dough development, so the dough needs all the help it can get, so this doesn’t turn into a multi-day project.

The salt content is 2.2% which is pretty standard.

Weight	Ingredient	Baker's Percentage
320g	all-purpose flour	100%
40g	sugar	12.5%
100g	egg, whole	31.3%
100g	skim milk (0.5%)	31.3%
80g	starter (100% hydration)	25%
7g	salt	2.2%
60g	butter, salted	18.8%

If you. want to change quantity, hydration, inoculation, or other things, you can do so here in my Bread Calculator.

The filling

The filling for this babka is a chocolate filling. Babka’s can be filled with anything your culinary heart desires.

Use the best chocolate you can get. If you don’t like dark chocolate, substitute it with a lower percentage of chocolate.

Weight	Ingredient	Baker's Percentage
75g	dark chocolate	23.4%
75g	sugar	23.4%
75g	butter, salted	23.4%
25g	cocoa powder	7.8%

If you want to, you can also make a cinnamon-based filling, which kinda makes this into a cinnamon bun bread. Maybe putting frosting on top would take this to the next level?

Weight	Ingredient	Baker's Percentage
100g	butter, salted	31.3%
100g	sugar	31.3%
30g	cinnamon	9.4%

The simple syrup

The syrup that’s brushed over the top of the babka gives the crust a sweet and crunchy texture, which is super pleasing. If you’ve never tried this before it’s a bit surprising, but in that wonderful, ‘What is this? Mmmh kind of way.

Weight	Ingredient	Baker's Percentage
50g	sugar	15.6%
50g	water	15.6%

The conclusion of the sourdough babka recipe

So what would I expect from a sourdough babka?

• Wonderfully enriched dough with a well-fermented taste
• No sourdough tang
• A great chocolate filling with lots of taste and sweetness
• A gorgeous looking bread

Looking at the bread it just looks so inviting. Wonderfully caramelized exterior with random streaks of chocolate popping out.

Cutting into this babka reveals the wonderful inside. Just like a brioche, well-fermented a full of small and evenly distributed alveoli (aka bubbles or holes). Because of the braided shaping, each piece has a unique crumb with random spots of wonderful gooey chocolate.

Take a bite and the bread is soft as a pillow, but the crust is sweet and crunchy. The taste of the bread is delicious. The pockets of chocolate are pure heaven. Smooth, deep dark chocolate flavor balanced by just the right amount of sweetness.

This is something else. I think you should try baking this babka.

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