A recent visit to the Julien Filoche Pâtisserie, on the Left Bank of Paris, confirmed what friends had been telling me. An exciting new trend was emerging in the form of an old dish: babka.
At this charming shop, brioche and croissants shared equal status on the shelves with babkas laced with pink candied almonds and orange flower water or gooey chunks of chocolate and roasted hazelnuts, in contrast with more traditional versions that employ cinnamon or cocoa powder. When I asked Mr. Filoche why he started making such fancy babka, he said that he liked experimenting with the yeasty, buttery dough, so akin to brioche.
Recipe: Apple and Honey Babka
“People don’t even know if babka is Jewish, or is it Polish?” said my friend, the cookbook author Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. (Babka, a Polish, Ukrainian and Yiddish word meaning “little grandmother,” first came to Paris with Polish Jewish immigrants in the late 19th century.)
“For the moment,” though, she added, “it seems to be artisanal.” To prove her point, she urged me to visit more bakeries, especially Babka Zana, which was among the leaders of the craze.
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