Making paska, Ukrainian Easter bread...

It’s a core memory of my childhood, my mother baking on the weekends, usually on Saturday evening so we’d be ready for anyone who came by after church on Sunday. My father’s favorites were always top of the list, walnut torte, or a plum cake topped off with extra sugar for that distinctive crunch.

As I got older, I would get to help her with the baking, making sure nothing burned, with the benefit of cooks treat being getting the first taste. The holidays were always the most important, especially Easter, which meant making Paska, Ukrainian Easter Bread. We all learned how to make it at her knee, my sisters and I, and years later, my daughter was “helping” at four and five years old. It’s a sweet memory of my mother that we both share now that she has passed on.

We would bake them during Holy week, usually on Holy Thursday and always starting with a prayer, asking that our paska and babka would turn out well. We’d still have so many tins ready to be filled, giant 2 lb coffee cans, medium-sized, all the way down to small tins that could fit in the tiny Easter baskets for the younger children. It’s the waiting, the multiple rises of the dough that would have us on edge, hoping that they wouldn’t fall in the oven, but turn out tall and beautiful. Once we pulled them out of the oven and cooled down, we’d select the “least pretty” one to taste. That was the best part. My mother learned from her mother as a girl in Ukraine long before immigrating to the United States with her husband and children from a displaced person camp after the war. She kept those family and religious traditions close to her heart, and in teaching us those recipes, she taught me to keep them in my heart.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to perfect the recipe, so it tastes as it did in my childhood, but I keep trying each Easter.

Ukrainian Easter Bread - Paska

Ingredients

1 tsp. sugar
1 cup lukewarm water
1 package dry granular yeast (1/4 oz = 7g)
3 cups scalded whole milk, lukewarm
5 cups of flour
6 eggs, beaten
1 cup sugar
½ cup melted butter
1 tsp. salt
1 Tbs. orange zest
1 tsp. lemon zest
6 cups of sifted flour 

Instructions

Dissolve the sugar in the lukewarm water and sprinkle the yeast over it. Let it stand for 10 minutes in a warm place, until bubbly.

Combine the softened yeast with the lukewarm milk and 5 cups of flour. Beat well until smooth.  Cover and let the batter rise in a warm place until light and bubbly (I like to keep it in a warm oven. I preheat the oven to 150 degrees F, turn it off, the place the batter there to rise).

Once the batter is ready, add the beaten eggs, sugar, melted butter, salt, orange and lemon zest. Mix thoroughly.. Gradually keep on adding the remaining 6 cups of flour, and mixing, until the dough is neither too soft, nor too stiff. Sometimes I use only 5 cups of flour, but other times all 6 cups are used, depending on the humidity in the house and the flour.  If using raisins, add them in now.

Knead until the dough no longer sticks to the hand (at least 30 minutes by hand, or 20 minutes in a mixer.

Cover the bowl of dough with a tea towel, place it in a warm place, free of draft (I use the warm oven again), and let it rise until double in bulk (about 1 - 1.5 hours). Punch it down, and let it rise again (this time it will be less than 30 minutes).

Prepare your loaf pans by thoroughly greasing them with shortening.

Divide the dough into as many parts as you have pans to be filled 1/3 full, plus leave some dough, (about the size of an orange), for the ornamental decorations.

To make decorative ornaments, one of them being a cross, you roll out some dough into a rope like shape and form it into an ornamental cross, then place it in the center of the top of the bread. Now that your loaves are decorated, dip a pastry brush in whole milk, and gently brush the bread tops, and ornaments, to give them a nice golden crust color, once baked.  For a darker shade of the crust, you may use a wash made out of one egg beaten with 2 Tbs. of water.

Set the loaves in a warm place, once more, until almost double in bulk (they will extend slightly over the rim of the pans).    Do not let the loaves rise longer than necessary, because the ornaments will lose their shape.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F, and bake the bread for 10 minutes.   Lower the temperature to 350 degrees, and bake for 30 minutes longer, or until done. Smaller loaves may be done a little sooner, so use your judgement. I place larger loves towards the back of the oven and smaller ones in the front part of the oven. To prevent the tops from over browning, you may loosely drape large pieces of aluminum foil over the bread, once the crust is golden.

Remove the loaves from the oven and let cool in pans for 5 minutes. Then gently remove from pans onto a towel, or cooling rack, to cool completely.

If you like raisins in your bread, you may add 1-2 cups of golden raisins to your dough before final mix. You also need to make sure to push them deeper into the dough before baking, or they will burn if sticking out of the bread.