07 May THE LAWS OF HAFRASHAS CHALLAH WITH RABBI MOSHE ELEFANT / OU

Hafrashas challah
is a huge mitzvah
and a wonderful
opportunity to
do a mitzvah.
The most important issue
you have to know about
hafrashas challah is that
you can only take challah
with a bracha when you
have five pounds of dough.
The second issue is the
type of dough you use.
Yeast dough, which is what
we use to make bread,
challah, and kokosh cake with, is the
kind of dough you would take challah.
What’s known as the Belilah Rakkah,
which is the dough that’s used to make
doughnuts, like before Chanukah, or
sponge cake, where you take off challah
without a bracha.

The last issue I would bring up
regarding challah is that many people
use whole wheat flour. What is whole
wheat flour? The wheat has bran around
it. Interestingly, it used to be that that
bran was considered
very inferior and the
way to make good flour
was they removed the
bran. Then somebody
said that bran is very
healthy. There are two
ways of making whole
wheat flour; one way is
that they don’t remove
the bran at all and then
that’s regular flour with the five pound
rule. Sometimes the way they make
whole wheat is that they remove the
bran and then put it back in. If that’s
the way the flour was made, then the
bran is not flour and therefore that
can’t be included in the calculation of

the five pounds. I’ve read articles that
when they make whole wheat flour that
way, the whole wheat flour could be up
to 27% bran, so if you want to make
challah from whole wheat flour and you
want to take challah with a bracha, you
need to add 27% to five pounds in order
to be able to make the bracha.

Can one use very sweet cinnamon
challah for lechem mishneh, even
though it is more like cake than
bread, and the bracha would be
mezonot?

Very sweet cinnamon challah is a
dessert-like item. When eaten alone,
the bracha is mezonot. However, if you
use it as the basis of the meal, then the
bracha is upgraded to hamotzi and it
may be used as lechem mishneh.