The challah that changed everything: tracing Jewish baking back to Poland

The challah that changed everything: tracing Jewish baking back to Poland

Laurel Kratochvila was a 23 year-old from Sharon, Mass. living in Prague, working as a bartender, when she crossed into Poland with her boyfriend, entered a village bakery, and bit into a loaf of braided bread that the baker called chalka. Then her life changed. “I ripped into the still-warm loaf and stuffed long strands of fragrant egg bread into my mouth,” she writes in her new cookbook,  Dobre Dobre: Baking from Poland and Beyond. “How was it…