Medha Imam: You may not recognize Green's Bakery by name,
but peek into the baked-goods aisle
of your local Whole Foods or Wegmans,
and you will see this.
Loaves upon loaves of an iconic New York treat,
a bread-cake hybrid called babka.
Jerry Seinfeld: That's the last babka.
They got the last babka.
Elaine Benes: I know.
They're going in first with the last babka.
Seinfeld: That was our babka.
Elaine: You can't beat a babka!
Seinfeld: We had that babka!
Medha: Green's Bakery is one spot
that's selling its babka all over New York City.
Marc Fintz: If you go anywhere in the country,
if people know anything about babka,
or you say the word babka,
they're gonna think about Green's,
and they're gonna think about New York City.
Medha: Green's Bakery is a third-generation
family-run business based in Brooklyn.
It's actually New York's biggest babka wholesaler,
and it sells its legendary babka
to some of the most iconic delis and markets in the city,
some who replace Green's packaging with their own.
Marc: Whether it has our name or not,
you're gonna find that it's Green's babka.
Medha: So if you've ever bought a loaf
of babka in New York City,
there's a high chance it came from Green's.
The 70-year-old business produces roughly
4,000 loaves a day, six days a week.
Its babka comes in two flavors:
chocolate and cinnamon,
with chocolate babka being the best seller.
From a basement kitchen to a factory,
we're here in Brooklyn to get a behind-the-scenes look
at how Green's Bakery turned its babka
into a legendary institution.
Green's bakery was born from the
traditional recipes of Chana Green,
a Holocaust survivor
who came to the United States from Hungary
after World War II.
When she brought her family to the US in 1948,
her sweet, braided babka recipe also came in tow.
Chana Green started off making babka for just friends
and family when she first moved to the Lower East Side.
Then, Green began selling her treat
at her son-in-law's restaurant,
called Green & Ackerman, in Williamsburg in 1980
as a dessert called kokosh cake.
Customers and neighbors fell in love with her cake,
requesting it nonstop.
Marc: She was not really thinking of it as a business;
she was thinking of it as a way to help the people
in the neighborhood and share her love.
Her son would go to the local supermarket
and take empty boxes and bring them back
so that she could deliver them to the people.
And all of a sudden, it became the basis
and the format for a business model.
Medha: After 10 years of fulfilling orders
from the basement of the restaurant,
Green's family decided to relocate to Brooklyn
in 1991 and opened for business.
Marc: The babka that you're gonna eat today from Green's
is gonna be the same babka that
you would've eaten 50 years ago from Green's.
It's the family recipe.
It's the same product that Chana Green
was making in her kitchen on the Lower East Side.
Medha: Over the past few years,
Green's has expanded its inventory
to include other Jewish and Eastern European pastries,
like rugelach and honey cakes.
But it truly was its staple item
that paved the way for its success:
its traditional homestyle babka.
Babka starts off with simple ingredients,
like sugar, flour, oil, water, and eggs,
and there's absolutely no butter or dairy.
The ingredients are all mixed together,
kneaded, and shaped into dough balls.
Green's babka is made in two ways:
by machine and by hand.
First, the dough is flattened out in a sheeter.
Once the dough is at the right thickness,
it is inserted into an automatic pastry production line.
Depending on the flavor of the babka,
either liquid marble cocoa or cinnamon
is sprinkled onto the dough.
Then the wide slab of dough is cut in two
and twisted into a roll.
At the end, two workers braid the dough
to form the legendary babka shape.
Green's workers package the products
and prepare them to be delivered to grocery stores,
markets, and delis across the city and the country.
With the overwhelming scent of chocolate
and cinnamon goodness filling the bakery air,
I couldn't wait to get my hands on the legendary babka.
This is my first-ever tasting of a chocolate babka.
Now, that's a beauty.
You can taste the crispiness of the outside
of the dough that has been baking
in that really traditional oven back there,
and then immediately you are hit with the chocolate.
And then this moist inside
that just melts in your mouth.
I could totally see myself eating this
at breakfast with a cup of coffee.
The cinnamon babka.
That is wonderful.
It's, like, the perfect amount of cinnamon,
perfect amount of sweetness.
I'm just so happy that a woman name Chana Green
came from Hungary,
brought her own recipe to New York City,
and has made it such a staple.