When I set out to develop a gata recipe for Serious Eats, I was faced with the dilemma of deciding which style to choose from among so many. I didn’t grow up eating gata, and what I knew of the dish came from cookbooks and stories of friends and family who had eaten it on trips to Armenia. I knew I wanted something on the sweeter end of the spectrum—more coffee cake than savory bread—and I wanted to keep the preparation relatively simple. Which meant that the okhlavoo-rolled version was out; rolling out transparently-thin sheets of dough without tearing requires a lot of practice, not to mention miles of counter space. Since I am a bread person, and I knew I wanted some yeast in the picture, I chose to go with a walnut khoritz-filled cake made with a yeasted dough.
The dough I created is buttery and tender, thanks in great part to the fact that it is moistened almost entirely with Greek yogurt.
