Hanukkah sweets: 8 nights of doughnuts, fritters, cake and gelt ice cream

The tree is not the thing. It’s the sugary lead up to Christmas, with its dizzying array of cookie exchanges, chocolate advent calendars and pies galore, that makes Jewish kids young and old feel left out during the holidays.

Foil-wrapped gelt just doesn’t quite compare.

In the Bay Area, Jewish foodmakers are whipping up classic and wildly creative treats to make sure this year’s Hanukkah options go beyond not-particularly-chocolatey chocolate coins.

Restaurants like Meso in San Jose and Pomella in Oakland are offering spiffed-up versions of sufganiyot. Bad Walter’s Bootleg Ice Cream, also based in Oakland, is crafting Hanukkah flavors like Rolling in Gelt, made with dark chocolate and olive oil. And OMG! Yummy’s Beth Lee of San Jose has a new cookbook with dozens of sweet recipes to make your house — for once — the envy of the neighborhood this holiday season.

Mica Talmor, chef-owner of Pomella, the Israeli-California eatery on Piedmont Avenue, is offering two Hanukkah sweets: a gorgeously gourmet doughnut filled with strawberry and raspberry jams from Oakland’s Donut Savant, and her own citrus-tinged Ricotta Fritters, which are inspired by Italian-style zeppole. Covered in powdered sugar and served with quince dipping sauce, they remind her of sfinge, the light and airy Moroccan doughnuts she grew up eating as a kid in Haifa, Israel.

“We waited all year for doughnuts,” Talmor says. “We still only eat them once a year. It’s essential.”

To commemorate the eight-day Festival of Lights, which begins on Nov. 28 this year, Talmor is throwing a veritable Hanukkah food festival. Each night, the restaurant will feature a collaboration with a different Bay Area chef or purveyor. In addition to the sufganiyot, which will be available Dec. 3 and 4, San Francisco deli Mark ‘n Mike’s will serve its popular Reuben Latkes there on Nov. 29. And Berkeley’s Boichik Bagels is doing Merguez Bagel Sandwiches with fried egg, feta aioli and harissa on Dec. 5.

“I just want this year to be special,” says Talmor, who opened Pomella last December at the height of the pandemic, strictly for to-go and later for outdoor dining. But the restaurant’s 75-capacity indoor dining room only opened this past summer.

“Now that we have people indoors, let’s gather and celebrate and have fun as a community,” she says.

With Lee’s “The Essential Jewish Baking Cookbook” (Rockridge Press, $17) in hand, you can get your entire block in the Hanukkah spirit. The book is a treasure trove of Lee’s family recipes, which stretch from her East Coast roots (Black and White Cookies) to non-fried dessert ideas (hello, Marble Pound Cake). The cake is made with olive oil to recall the Rededication of the Temple in 2nd century BCE Jerusalem, when a small amount of oil miraculously burned for eight days.

Lee, who avoids deep frying, even came up with a baked version of her sufganiyot. You can use the same dough recipe, which calls for two tablespoons of vegetable oil, whether you bake them or fry them. The baked doughnuts, which are brushed with melted butter and coated in sugar, are fluffier and stay fresh longer, but otherwise taste the same. Lee’s tasting panel agreed.

“I was fully expecting everybody to prefer the fried version,” she says, “but you can hardly taste a difference.”

And then there’s the dessert to end all other desserts: cold, creamy ice cream handmade by Bad Walter’s Ice Cream founder and New York transplant Sydney Arkin. Born in her Oakland home during the pandemic, Arkin’s operation has gone legit with a new commissary kitchen in Fruitvale that will allow her to double her formerly tiny production of chunky artisanal flavors, like Slumber Party, a Ritz cracker flavor with thick swirls of chocolate, Nutter Butter and Reese’s Pieces.

“I like the ability to tell a story with the ice cream,” she says. “This one tastes like being 12 and raiding the refrigerator at night with your friends.”

Her Hanukkah flavors, which will be available for preorder on Dec. 1, also tell a story. Rolling in Gelt is a dark chocolate ice cream with chocolate-covered potato chips and olive oil swirl. Sufganiyot is a doughnut-flavored ice cream made with local doughnuts, mixed berry jam and doughnut crumbles.

It’s important to her to showcase Jewish flavors, like she did with a Passover-inspired ice cream last spring. There isn’t enough public appreciation of Jewish foods, she says. That can feel especially true during the winter holiday season.

“A lot of Jewish desserts, like rugelach and black and white cookies, lose credit because people just associate it with deli,” Arkin says. “But deli is Jewish. And we’re a people who just love to celebrate with sugar. For Purim, we make fun of an evil man by eating triangle-shaped cookies. We call kugel a side dish. And we have an entire holiday — Shavuot — dedicated to cheesecake.”

She’s right. Forget the gelt.