Rainbow Round Challah

This Rainbow Challah is a fluffy and sweet enriched bread that’s six strands of rainbow colors braided into a stunning round challah. It’s the perfect bread for sandwiches, Friday evening dinner, Pride month, or any celebration that calls for a colorful showstopper.

So read on for all the tips and tricks for making colored bread and making a braided round challah. Or just grab your food coloring, hit that purple Jump to Recipe button, and let’s make this round rainbow challah recipe!

Ingredients

This rainbow challah is an enriched bread like my chocolate chip brioche, Japanese milk bread rolls, and Portuguese bread. Enriched breads have not only flour, yeast, and salt, but enriched bread dough often has milk, eggs, and butter. Typical challah, like this rainbow round challah, my raisin challah and challah buns, use eggs and vegetable oil but omit dairy so it can accompany both meat and dairy.

I find that artificial food coloring gives you the brightest colors, and natural food coloring often is more muted – you can see example in my purple cow bread. I’ll be testing more natural food colors in this rainbow challah and will update this post when I do!

Recipe tips and tricks

It is easiest to make challah using a stand mixer, but you can do it by hand if you have the arm strength and patience. First mix the dry ingredients in the bowl. In a small bowl or two-cup measuring cup, whisk together the eggs (reserving one white for an egg wash), oil, honey, and water.

Mix the wet ingredients into the dry, and, switching to the dough hook. Knead the challah dough for eight to ten minutes until smooth and pliant. It should not be sticky, so add a bit more flour if it is very tacky, or a touch more water if it is dry.

Divide the challah dough into 6 equal portions. Each will weigh approximately 160 grams.

Next comes the most time-consuming part. You’ll need to knead the rainbow food coloring into each piece until they are as uniform as possible.

My mixer can’t handle small amounts of dough, so I color the rainbow challah dough by hand. If yours is the same, I recommend food-safe kitchen gloves or a spatula to mix the colors so you don’t stain your hands.

When making this rainbow challah, my rainbow milk bread, or rainbow sugar cookies, I color the dough in the following order: yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, and then green. Place the rainbow-colored dough balls in a pan, cover loosely with plastic wrap, and let rise until double. This will take one to two hours, depending on your kitchen temperature.

Keep the balls of dough covered while you work. Take one ball at a time and roll it out into a log about 16 inches long. If your dough is very springy, give that one a rest and move on to the next dough ball.

There are several ways to braid a round challah. For this example, I’ve set up a basketweave, then created four three-strand braids, which I tucked to the side to create the round.

After shaping your round challah, place the rainbow challah on a parchment-lined baking sheet, cover loosely, and let rise again for about an hour until puffy. You can also place the challah round in a cake pan to rise.

Heat your oven to 325°F (160°C). Right before baking, brush the rainbow challah round with the reserved egg white, lightly beaten. Bake for about 10 minutes, then brush again with more egg white.

Bake your rainbow challah for 35 to 45 minutes until golden and hollow-sounding and it reaches an internal temperature of 190°F (88°C). The exterior colors of the rainbow challah will brown during this time – I usually try to minimize this by loosely tenting the baking challah with aluminum foil about five to ten minutes after the second egg wash.

Cool on a wire rack for at least one hour before slicing!

Recipe FAQs

Related rainbow recipes

Looking for other rainbow recipes from my rainbow food archives? Check out: