This recipe is perfect. I used Pioneer all purpose flour and let the eggs get to room temp. I like to top my bread with seeds and coarse salt. This time I used poppy, sesame and caraway seeds with sea salt. The loaves are enormous. I braided two of them and put them into large bread pans. I did flour and oil the pans and I put cornmeal on the bottom. I baked at 325 after initially heating to 350 and it took only 28 mins. I put a tablespoon of honey in with the yeast and water to feed the yeast. I found it took only about 10 cups of flour but I did use 2 cups of whole wheat flour in that mix.

My neighbor and I enjoy baking together, and one day I brought the extra challah loaf I had baked with my mother for the jewish Sabath. She loved it and immediately we decided to find our own recipe to bake together. We have tried several and decided that this was the best. It makes two huge loaves, so we each get one, and we add poppy seeds to the sesame seeds. Its nice and soft but firm as challah should be. It tastes amazing with a little butter when its still a bit warm from the oven. YUM!!!!

Wonderful recipe! My room mate and I were quite delighted that this bread turned out so well. I'm not a very experienced bread maker, but I was amazed at how well this came out. Too bad we ate it too quickly to take a picture.

I halved this recipe, double the sugar, and added 1 TBSP of crisco to the batter while mixing and mine came out absolutely wonderful! Got great reviews and many requests already! Not only is it gorgeous and impressive looking physically, it was incredibly delicious! Thanks for the great recipe!

Fresh eggs make this recipe even better, if that is possible! I was not much of a bread maker until now. This recipe is definately hard to mess up, beautiful, and tastes great! My 9 and 5 year old love to shape it with me!

This bread was very tasty, but once cut it dried out very quickly. I will try adding potato flakes the next time as another reviewer mentioned. Otherwise, it was a really good bread.

Help! The first time I made this bread it was beautiful. The second time the braids pulled away from center. I am not sure what I did wrong. Monicatfp

ABSOLUTELY AMAZING BREAD! Recipe makes 2 giant loaves though. =) Lots of work, but well worth it.

The recipe was ENORMOUS! It mad two huge loaves. It was very good but a little dry, so I think next time I will try a previous tip and add potato flakes. I did brush the top fo one with egg white and honey, and the other with egg white and cinnamon and sugar. Made them much better, but I think next time I will incorporate the items into the dough as well.

Made a few minor changes as suggested and it turned out wonderful. My braiding was not perfect though. : ) Well make again!

I took this to our Easter lunch and my boyfriends extremely picky brothers gobbled this up. They kept eating it and eating it. They didn't even use a knife to cut pieces off, they would just reach over and rip off a chunk. THey said it was the best thing on the table and referred to it as a giant pretzel. I thoroughly enjoyed it myself.

WOW - what an amazing loaf of bread that i made. I made this for easter sunday with my 2 children. I made it into a ring and the only change i made was that i added about a tablespoon of fennel. I can't tell you how amazing it was. Everyone not only loved the bread but they were amazed at the size and taste. I will make this again and again!

Made this bread for the first time for Easter this year. After making into a braid and it doubled in size, we thought the dough was going to take over the kitchen. Huge does not describe this dough - we need a much larger word. After baking, however, the bread did disappear in a very short period of time. It was excellent, just a little scary at first!

I followed the recipe exactly; it made two huge loaves and they turned out wonderful. I used the dough hook attachment on my Kitchen Aid mixer to knead the dough and there was so much that it barely fit in my mixing bowl. I wouldn't know how it keeps... it was gone at the end of dinner. Everyone commented on its distinctive taste and how it would make great sandwich bread for any leftover Easter ham. Unfortunately we will not know. :)