Blessed Braid brings kosher baked goods to Irvine
Walking into the Blessed Braid in Irvine feels like walking into owner Cheryl Honig’s kitchen. The modern kosher bakery, which celebrated its grand opening earlier this month, isn’t set up like a traditional bakery with a case of baked goods behind glass. Instead Honig’s bakery has a marble-topped counter at the center she calls the “welcome island” with plates of cookies, rolls and bread on display under glass cloches.
“When I was designing the bakery, I did not want to have a division between the guest and the host,” Honig said.
Honig has been baking her whole adult life, mostly for family at home, where she has two farm-style tables she sets with food whenever she hosts an event.
“Everyone walks around with their plate and gathers their food. It allows everyone to congregate, to converse and to be integrated and to feel like home. I wanted that same thing for my bakery.”
Honig started selling Challah, a three-strand braided bread, from her home about three years ago.
“I got a permit from the Orange County Health Department to do so,” she said. “Then at one point I had to decide if I wanted to keep my business small or go into a brick and mortar.”
She took to turning the Irvine space, formerly a bookstore, into her dream bakery with blue wainscoting and hanging pendant lights over the welcome island creating a homey feel.
Customers circle the island and feast their eyes on traditional goods like Challah bread she makes in traditional, raisin, poppy seed, sesame seed and marble chip. Vegan Challah is also available on request.
“We started with 10 base products, which were all my recipes,” Honig said.
Treats from her head bakers make it to the island as a “weekly surprise.”
“Then we get feedback from our customers and then it gets promoted to a regular item on our welcome island, like our gluten-free chocolate soufflé cookie,” said Honig.
Honig’s business philosophy goes beyond her bakery’s layout. The Blessed Braid is non-dairy and kosher certified.
“We are a completely kosher certified bakery, meaning every single ingredient, all the equipment, has been inspected and analyzed by rabbis up at the Rabbinical Council of California,” said Honig. “And we are all non-dairy, so there is no cream, no butter.”
The kosher certification means a few extra steps for her team.
“Prior to opening, anything that was glass, ceramic or metal had to go through a mikvah,” Honig said, referring to the ceremonial bath designed for the Jewish rite of purification.
Sometimes, keeping kosher presents unique challenges. For example, Honig recently worked with the Jewish Israel Club of Woodbridge High School on a fundraiser to support Ukraine and looked high and low before finally finding blue and yellow decorating sugar that was certified kosher for a Ukraine-themed cookie.
Although the Blessed Braid is kosher certified, it is not certified for Passover, which would mean many more additional requirements. The bakery closes in observance of Jewish holidays and will shut its doors from April 18 to 22 for Passover.
But Honig said taking the care to make sure her business is kosher certified also means that more people can enjoy it. Part of Jewish dietary law dictates that meat and milk products not be mixed together.
“Any Jew of any level of observance can eat any product, at any meal, and feel free to give it to any friend and not have to worry that there is any dairy in it,” said Honig.
Besides Challah, popular items include kichel, a Yiddish name for a crunchy bow-tie shaped cookie dressed in turbinado sugar and kamishbroyt, a raisin and maraschino cherry treat whose name is derived from the word used in Ukraine to describe a cookie and the Yiddish word for bread.
Nontraditional fare is also on display, like a peanut butter and jelly cookie topped with salty potato chips, and a butterscotch haystack made with salted peanuts and crunchy chow mein noodles held together with melted butterscotch chips and peanut butter.
“One of signature things is our Belgian street waffle,” Honig said. “We make those right here when the guest is waiting and then they get to walk away with a warm waffle that has pearl sugar in it and is dusted with powdered sugar.”
Two waffle irons sit in the corner of the kitchen, visible from the large picture window that allows guests to see right into the kitchen.
“I wanted people to see that we are fully transparent, that we only have wholesome ingredients that you can easily spell and pronounce,” said Honig.
Guests aren’t the only ones watching the bakery.
As part of the process of maintaining her kosher certification, Honig works closely with the Rabbinical Council of California, a nonprofit that addresses food, legal and other issues for the Jewish community in California. Each quarter, Honig’s kosher certification gets renewed through the council.
“There are six cameras in the bakery, and the rabbis have access to them 24/4,” Honig said. “And then every month, there is a secret rabbi that comes in, and he doesn’t tell us when, and he inspects everything.”
Honig maintains that the Orange County Jewish community needs a kosher bakery, and she is happy to provide that place. By making everything kosher and nondairy, items are accessible to all members of the Jewish community, and there is no restrictions on when and what they can buy in terms of Jewish dietary law.
And making everyone feel welcome in her kitchen is the icing on the black-and-white cookie.
“It’s like we are putting on a party and our customers are really our guests,” Honig said.
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