Just add hot water? Matzah balls get a glow-up for the harried home cook
For most of Jewish culinary history, anyone seeking to make matzah balls faced one major choice: sinkers or floaters?
In the 20th century, with the advent of home-cooking conveniences, another decision joined the one about density: from scratch or from a box?
Now, in an era of niche food products, home cooks have a new set of matzah ball options: freeze-dried, flash-frozen, and flecked with furikake, the Japanese seasoning mix including seaweed and sesame seeds.
As soup season approaches, a growing number of new efforts are underway to remake Jewish culture’s most iconic comfort food for the harried home cook. Both legacy brands and new startups are getting into the matzah ball game, aiming to simplify production so that a bowl of steaming, tasty soup can always be just minutes away.
Nooish, which hit shelves in September, is a just-add-hot-water option that comes in a paper ramen container, emblazoned with iconography and lettering that its designer says subtly reflects American Jewish visual culture.
Shalom Japan, the Brooklyn Jewish-Japanese fusion restaurant, has recently launched a mail-order matzah ball ramen kit that allows home cooks to replicate its signature dish.
And even Manischewitz, the vaunted kosher brand that launched in 1888 as a matzah producer, has innovated on its longstanding line of box mixes. Now, Manischewitz matzah balls can be found in many supermarkets’ freezer sections.
“I don’t know if everyone is ready to make a matzah ball or is able to, especially the younger demographic,” said Shani Seidman, chief marketing officer of Kayco, the owner and distributor of Manischewitz. “But if you have it readily available in the freezer, you can plop it into any soup.”
The trend has prompted debate among Jewish food icons, many of whom have their own recipes and traditions for the soup that is a mainstay of Shabbat and holiday tables from the onset of cozy season until Passover in the spring.
Calling matzah balls “the supreme Jewish comfort food,” Joan Nathan, the matriarch of the Jewish food world, said she believed the readymade options are unnecessary and likely subpar. (Her own recipe calls for fresh ginger and nutmeg and results in balls that are neither overly dense nor especially light.)
“Matzah balls are so easy to make,” she said. “They don’t take any time at all. It probably takes less time to make them than to buy them.”
But Adeena Sussman, author of the cookbooks “Sababa” and “Shabbat,” said she understands why some cooks would turn to readymade options. Her own family is divided: Her mom, Steffi, was firmly planted in the box-mix camp as she prepared food for 60 people at two Passover seders every year. As an adult, Sussman has taken to making her own family’s matzah balls from scratch, sharing a recipe in her collaborator Chrissy Teigen’s cookbook that calls for seltzer and black pepper.
“Not everyone has a great matzah ball recipe or the wherewithal to make matzah balls,” Sussman said. “It’s a hard time to be a Jew. Even a little Jewish comfort, by adding hot water to a matzah ball mix, I am all for it. I think it’s great.”
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
comments