What's Better Than Babka? Meet Kokosh
Photo credit: Lily’s Bakery Shop
What to do when a babushka-clad bubbe snatches the last babka out from under your nose? Consider kokosh, the babka-like Jewish pastry that deserves to be more than simply a second choice.
"It’s sinfully good and worth every calorie," explained Israel Maierovits, owner of Toronto, Canada’s kosher bakeshop Hermes Bakery, which his father founded in the early 1950s. Maierovits has served kokosh, a rolled pastry filled with chocolate or a cinnamon-sugar mixture, for more than two decades.
The shop also serves babka, the cocoa- or cinnamon-laced pastry with which you may be more familiar. It employs a straight yeast dough rather than the butter-heavy Danish dough Maierovits favors for kokosh, which features ”more fat and more flavor.” He believes both pastries have the same Eastern European origins, but kokosh is a specifically Hungarian expression.
Babka is often braided and baked in square or rectangular loaves. Kokosh, on the the other hand, is typically longer and flatter—and has been a big hit with patrons. "It’s really grown in popularity," said Maierovits.
There are few kokosh recipes swirling around the internet, and you can also order them online at places like Lily’s Bakeshop or eKosher.com. But Maierovits suggests paying him a visit at Hermes.
"I’ve seen kokosh from a dozen different places: It basically boils down to the quality of the dough, the quality of the filling, and how it’s baked and risen,” he said. The true mark of a good kokosh? “With ours, people come ‘specially to get it and order it.”
If only it was available when Jerry Seinfeld lost out on the last chocolate babka in this classic episode. “Another babka?” he wonders aloud.
Close but not exactly, Jerry. Give kokosh a whirl!
