Chocolate babka dough calculator
New York chocolate babka: a buttery, egg-rich dough chilled overnight so it twists cleanly.
Total hydration counts the water inside the eggs, milk and butter.
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. As in brioche, the butter goes in after gluten development, and the overnight refrigeration is required — only cold dough twists 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.
Sources & methodology
Every percentage in this calculator traces to the published sources below — nothing is invented. Where respected sources disagree, the default sits inside the documented range.
- Smitten Kitchen — better chocolate babka — The chosen NY-style krantz lineage (via Ottolenghi): 19% sugar, three eggs, 28% butter, overnight cold proof.
- Uri Scheft — Breads Bakery — The Breads Bakery lineage — 30% milk, 18% butter — recorded.
FAQ
What does the Breads Bakery version do differently?
Uri Scheft’s famous loaf runs a milk-based dough with less butter and, as widely reported, a Nutella filling. The Ottolenghi/Smitten lineage here is water-and-egg based with a from-scratch ganache-style filling. Both are established NY versions.
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. A little chocolate leaking at the pan edges is normal.
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