By Rabbi Rachel Esserman

If you are shaking your head wondering why those two food items appear in the same headline, you would not be alone. I did the same when reading an e-mail about Jewish happenings in New York City. I am a big fan of pizza: my favorite is the traditional sauce (lots of sauce, please!) and cheese pizza. When my mom, my Aunt Naomi and I used to travel to NYC to see Broadway matinees, a slice of pizza from one of the numerous pizza joints that existed at the time was our dinner. (We never sat: we would pick up a slice and eat it while walking so we could do more shopping.)
On the other hand, I am not a big fan of babka. I don’t remember eating it when I was growing up in Endwell. As an adult, it was just not on my radar as a Jewish food. Bagels, on the other hand, were a Jewish food and it used to be difficult to find good ones in upstate New York. When we visited relatives in Queens, we would bring bagels back home with us. (I have one memory of people going into the bagel shop on a Sunday morning and asking for one or two bagels. My parents were ordering them in dozens.) Anyway, although I’ve come to like toasted babka with cream cheese or butter, it would not be my first choice on any menu.
This means you might be able to imagine my shock and outrage when looking at an e-mail touting a new food available at Breads Bakery’s Brooklyn Bridge Park kiosk: a babka pizza. Then I calmed for a moment, thinking that this must be a sweet version of a pizza: maybe babka with other sweet toppings? The Google AI search result suggested that, but it turns out that AI was looking at babka recipes on YouTube, not the food combination offered at this particular bakery. 
The AI description is clearly wrong, at least when it comes to Breads’ babka pizza, which is described as having a “shakshuka-spiced tomato sauce and a thick layer of squeaky mozzarella on top.” The photos showed a melty, cheesy pizza slice made with babka dough. But that’s when I began to have hope: babka dough. Maybe this dough wasn’t the sweet version of babka, meaning dough filled with chocolate, cinnamon or other traditional sweet flavors. Maybe this was just regular pizza toppings placed on a different kind of dough.
I grew up with thin-crust pizza, but I am more than happy to eat those with thicker crusts, as long as they have enough tomato sauce. Would I like a pizza made with babka dough? I would be willing to try it since it looks to lean toward savory, not sweet. If someone is visiting Brooklyn and wants to bring me back a slice, I’ll be more than happy to do a taste test. My mother used to say that anything would taste good with tomato sauce. While I wouldn’t go that far (yuck, just imagine a sweet doughnut covered with tomato sauce), I am open to the possibility of a babka pizza as long as it sticks to savory ingredients.