Dark-chocolate babka from Michaeli Bakery.
Illustration: The Ellaphant in the Room

When Adir Michaeli opened his first Michaeli Bakery in 2019, he did so with a bold claim: It was he who first developed the recipe for the Nutella-laced, syrup-brushed babka that several years earlier had catapulted Breads Bakery to international fame. Michaeli did work at Breads, under baker Uri Scheft, but this origin story has never sat well with that bakery’s owner, Gadi Peleg. “He was hardly involved,” Peleg insists. “He was a small part of a big team — saying that he invented the babka in some way is like some engineer at Apple saying that they invented the iPhone or a cook at a Shake Shack saying they invented that burger. It’s absolutely false.”

Scheft — who has since co-founded the Bakey chain in Boston — has in the past claimed ownership over the recipe, too: Michaeli worked for him in Israel at Lehamim (the name translates to “breads”) to perfect that babka, where the sweet, swirled breads are as common as chocolate-chip cookies in the U.S. The two eventually came to New York to work on the opening team at Breads. It was only in this city that someone had the idea to add Nutella to the recipe, an ingredient that changed this country’s babka landscape for good. (New York Magazine called the Breads babka the best in the city in 2013, soon after that bakery opened.) Now, it is Michaeli who hopes to move the needle once again with an entirely new recipe that he’s unveiled at his bakeries.

Unlike Michaeli’s other babkas — he offers a number of flavors, including a familiar Nutella variant — his recipe for his dark-chocolate babka employs a more complicated lamination technique to create a lighter crumb, improve shelf life, and more evenly distribute the filling throughout the loaf. “A lot more layers, but not too many layers,” he says. “I really wanted people to feel something delicate when they cut into it — especially, let’s say, on day two.” (A taste test confirms these claims: It’s good babka.)

Why has he released it now? Could it have anything to do with a recent New York Times list of the “25 Essential Pastries to Eat in New York City” that credits Peleg and Scheft, but not Michaeli, for the Breads babka — an attribution that made Michaeli take to Instagram (“… still trying to hide the truth …”) in an attempt to correct the record? He says the timing is coincidental and that this new recipe was just ready to go.

Others have tried their hand at the twisted bread and made some good showings, but Breads continues to control the market share, having recently issued collaborations with Katie Lee (date babka), Jean-Georges Vongerichten (mixed-berry babka), and Padma Lakshmi (red-onion-chutney babka). Its babka remains the one to beat. “My guess is that somewhere in the first sentence of my obituary, it’s going to say ‘Breads Bakery’ and ‘babka,’” Peleg says modestly. “What’s happening here is this thing is successful. Everybody wants to take credit,” he adds. “I love that people are so emotionally involved with it and everybody wants a little piece.”

This post has been updated; the dough used in the new babka is not a new recipe.

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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the December 29, 2025, issue of
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