Matzah, my love

I love matzah. My wife loves matzah too. in fact even our Beagle Winston loves matzah.

Is that strange?

How much do we love it?

There is a custom not to eat matzah for a period before Passover – from 1 to 30 days – so that when you first eat it at the Passover seder it’s with extra joy and excitement. In the Rubinstein household, the month before Passover when we don’t eat matzah feels like the deprivation of something essential and life-giving. However, like winter in Pittsburgh (where I grew up and went to college), where the first spring day when it’s warm enough to go outside in a t-shirt is so glorious that it almost makes it worth the way-too-many months of winter spent indoors worth it, the first bite of matzah at seder after not eating matzah for a month is so delicious that it’s worth the month of deprivation.

Though I can’t imagine it, some people think matzah is something to endure once a year at Passover, and then block from their minds until faced with it again next year. They think of it as a flat, white square that tastes like cardboard and constipates you for days. Sure, you can grind it up and make it into matzah balls, and almost everyone likes matzah balls…that is unless the only ones they have had are the hard, dry, sit-in-your-stomach-for-days kind. (Yes, it’s true, some people like their matzah balls this way, but that’s something for them to take up in therapy).

In terms of cooked matzah, at lest traditionally, the highest form is Matzo Brei. The lowest, if you care about my opinion, are those soggy sponge cakes served at passover. (I’m sure your bubbie’s was great. No need to write.)

Did you know that not all matzah is white and square? Many people eat beautiful, hand-made, round, baked to a deep brown, shmura matzah. Other than being cracker-hard and dry, it shares few qualities with the square machine-made matzah that you are probably thinking about.

And here’s a shocker (to some people at least), it’s likely that the original matzah was probably not hard like a cracker, but was likely soft like a…well, like a middle eastern flatbread (which it is). In fact, there are still communities that eat soft matzah, and an increasing general acceptance that soft matzah is okay to eat at Passover.

I thought of writing about matzah during Passover, which just ended, but I never got around to it. Perhaps I was too busy eating matzah to write about it. As my beloved wife always says, you don’t want to spend more time talking about your relationship than you spend having it. The same thing is true of matzah, it seems: You shouldn’t spend more time writing about it than you spend eating it.

My hope this year was that I would finish building my new oven just in time to bake matzah in it for Passover, and that we would get to eat home baked matzah this year. (While not going into the Jewish law of matzah baking too much, I wouldn’t be able to use the oven that I used for baking bread throughout the year for making matzah for Passover). For many reasons, that didn’t happen. Truth be told, for other reasons of Jewish law that I won’t go into, I wasn’t sure that baking my own matzah was really that good of an idea anyway.

But now that passover is over, I can bake all of the matzah I want. So, I invite you to follow me down this strange journey into the land of matzah, where miracles happen, and battle lines are drawn, and the Metamucil flows freely.

The plan is to do three posts: The history of Matzah, recipes for baking matzah, and finally recipes for using matzah.

Buckle up!