How Matzo Is Made
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I warn every person that is running away from war or slavery - prepare your food well!! Don't create some future stupid obligatory traditions for your offspring!!
Prior to passover, we do a careful search of our household to find and remove leavened bread, even small bits. This is analogous to soul-searching for things within us where ego dominates and gets in the way of the kind of people we want to be. The symbolism of finding and taking the effort to remove these traces (or large chunks) of ego is powerful, and passover is a great periodic reminder to take this kind of inner inventory.
And then on the physical level, and still related to ego, I think there's a lot of little "addictions" that we have as people. "I can't live w/o a muffin in the morning" or whatever is pretty benign as far as addictions go, but even the difficulty of giving that up shows how much of our behavior is ruled by little irrelevant things in the world. And then our ability to get over that and just eat matzo for 8 days proves to ourselves that we can ultimately overcome these addictions that they don't matter. A modern version of that might be "for 8 days, you can only use a feature phone, no touchscreen devices!" :)
Now that I said all of this, I have to fess up that I love the crunchiness of Matza which I for the first time tasted around age 9 when the Soviet Union was opening up and someone brought us Matza from the US. It was literally my first "taste" of religion.
EDIT: to tie it together - passover is a holiday about freedom. On the literal level, exodus from slavery. On the metaphorical level, liberation from ego-domination and unconscious subjugation to the world instead of making active choices. Your ability to chose to just eat matza for 8 days is an assertion of your freedom over that. Your ego, and the world, would rather you load up on bagels - but you are somehow finding within yourself to forego that because of higher aspiration (even if that aspiration is merely to continue traditions of your ancestors) - and that is amazing and powerful in and of itself.
What makes modern matzah hard is the flour/water ratio. When more water is added, the bread is also softer. The issue with soft matzah is that it spoils quickly, and if you need bread for 7 days you need to make matzah during Passover.
Okay, you say, so make some matzah on Passover, right? But matzah is tricky, because if enough time passes between mixing the water and flour, it is considered leavened. (This is a religious definition, not a physical one.) Merely owning leavened bread is prohibited, so European Jews made dry matzah to prevent unfortunate slip-ups.
This custom started within the last few hundred years (again, I don't have sources, so I'm not sure about exact dates). Yemenite Jews still use soft matzah.
Edit: part of the Passover story mentions Hillel, who would wrap matzah around his Passover offering and bitter herbs. This definitely indicates soft matzah, but is much later than the Exodus itself.
there's a very early christian debate (I think settled at an early church council) if the bread of the eucharist (which many associate with matza) could be soft, or had to be hard like a cracker. So, either they were trying to distinguish it from matza (which doesn't seem to be the case), or there was crispy matza in the 1500-2000 year ago range.
Personally, I find soft matza to be terrible. our appreciation of food comes from both flavor and texture. Matza being just flour and water (no salt in traditional doughs), means it has terrible flavor (bread really really needs salt to taste not bad). Soft matza has no texture, while at least the crispy matza does.
so, a) I don't think crispy matza is a really a modern invention (they had analogues a long time ago) and b) there's a reason we moved en masse to crispy matza, its just more enjoyable overall.
Basically in the past matzo was made the day it was used because it would spoil otherwise (like any bread), but making matzo came with the risk of creating leaven which was a serious prohibition on Pesach itself.
So it's better to make it in advance, before Pesach, so they switched to dry/hard matzo that can keep forever.
These days there are freezers, and some groups make small quantities of the matzo the old way, and then freeze. It's not easy to get.
I'm not Jewish and I absolutely love Matzo. It's always on sale before Passover and I usually buy quite a few boxes and eat all of them. I use them either as crackers or even crumbled into soups or borscht. I think it tastes amazing for how simple it is. This year I'll try making a layered cake!
But if you want to define it as "on sale" = "cheaper price" then buy it right after Passover and stock up - it will last for more than year, so you can buy a lot.
The JS/Scroll capture in the original article results in lots of blank areas in the archive but I think the text is all there.
In Switzerland they have it most shops, from various brands.
Rakusens is the only brand that's easily available in most supermarkets (but I'm sure if I went to a more Jewish area than where I live they'd have a bigger variety.
And then after watching "Rick and Morty - Plumbus: how they do it" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMJk4y9NGvE) all these vids are ruined :)
I am not Jewish, but I often wonder why my family knew this and other things seemingly from Jewish culture. One of things I couldn't get an answer for.
The high temperature is great when you bake a lot in a row since it lets you work fast, but for home baking maybe an airfryer is an economical alternative.
What kinds of spreads?
- Butter + salt
- Butter + jam
- I guess butter + anything
- Brie cheese
I could go on. Try it y'all!
(There is also egg matzo but that is a different category)
OT: I cannot get openAI to draw me realistic hand matzo, no matter how hard I try :(
And there's nothing in the article that distinguishes this brand from any other.