Pizza babka went viral after it landed in the inboxes of everyone who subscribes to Bill Clark’s newsletter, A Piece of Cake.
Though it’s now a social-media trend that’s eventually bound to go the way of early pandemic banana-bread baking, Clark, a baker and co-owner of the now-closed MeMe’s Diner, told Insider his recipe is something of a gastronomic ode to New York City.
Babka is as much an icon in the New York food scene as pizza. So much so that some people have come to equate the twisted baked good with the city just as much as with its Jewish roots.
For some, like Gadi Peleg, the owner of NYC’s Breads Bakery, babka takes them back to childhood and family memories. For others, like Clark, it’s a symbol of the city’s culinary influence on all who visit and come to call this place their home.
“Yes, I know that babka is absolutely Jewish food, and as with so many Jewish food traditions, it’s deeply ingrained in the fabric of New York food,” Clark told Insider. “New York is really where I found my footing as a professional baker and started to consciously consume pastry. Babka being some of my favorite!”
“Like all the recipes on A Piece of Cake, pizza babka started with a question: ‘What do I want to eat right now?'” Clark told Insider. “And back in December 2020, what I wanted was my mom’s pizza bread.”
Growing up, he remembers his mother used to make pizza bread with store-bought frozen pizza dough, jarred sauce, pre-sliced pepperoni, and shredded mozzarella.
“I thought about how to take pizza bread a little further,” he said. “I’d made Claire Saffitz’s sour cream and chive rolls for Thanksgiving (as did half the internet) and it’s such a great dough. I changed it up, but that was the dough recipe inspo.”
Clark loves to see subscribers try his recipes at home and said his pizza babka is “definitely the most made and shared one so far.”
While it is creative, Clark notes that he’s certainly not the first to try this savory collaboration of flavors.
During his time working at MeMe’s Diner, which shuttered in November, Clark turned out a lineup of other savory babkas, including one inspired by the flavors of an everything bagel.
Though the flavor profile may sound sacrilegious to anyone who grew up eating any singular variety, chances are your preferred variety is considered “inauthentic” to someone else.
Peleg, who ownsBreads Bakery, told Insider that, when it comes to babka the battle of authenticity is “one you cannot win.”
Though his bakery is known for making one of the city’s best babkas, he still fields complaints that it’s not what an “authentic” babka should be.
“You know, ‘authentic’ is like ‘normal,'” Peleg said. “Normal is what your perception of normal is. It’s what you saw. It’s a very narrow-minded perception of the world that ‘My way is normal.’ And the same thing with authentic.”
“But maybe your grandmother went to the shop to get babka that was to the left,” he added, “and maybe the shop that was to the right that she didn’t go to did it a different way. “
He admits that, although it’s tough to distinguish the precise history of this particular baked good, he knows his bakery’s version of authentic babka is likely not the same as the way his own family in Eastern Europe once made it — and he’s perfectly fine with that.
“I don’t think my ancestors in Poland had chocolate,” Peleg laughed. “I spoke to many of them when they were still alive and, may they rest in peace, they had way bigger problems than going to chocolatiers and finding chocolate to put in their babka. So we’re all riffing.”
Clark’s pizza babka was inspired, in part, by his mother’s pizza bread.
Hunter Abrams for Bill Clark
When he created the chocolate babka for Breads, Peleg wanted to breathe new life into a treat he felt was stale. His memories of babka were interwoven with memories of his childhood, going shopping for the weekly bundt-shaped bread that he said was too often “associated with old people.”
Peleg said he’s thrilled that he, in some way, played a part in turning babka into something “young, fresh, and relevant, to the point that now it’s being riffed on by so many people.”
“And where else and at what other time on planet Earth do pizza and babka get to meet, other than 2021 New York City?” he said. “That’s sort of, to me, what New York is all about. The different cultures that come here to mix their food — what could be better? It’s really a beautiful thing.”
“I’m just hopeful that there’s some kid out there getting inspired to make the next great babka idea,” he added. “What’s the one after the pizza babka? I can’t wait to find out.”
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