All That’s Missing Is The Sun To Bake It On My Back

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Matzah is only slightly more fun than dreidl. As a lot of folks know, I’ve been trying to invent a dreidl game that’s any good at all for several years now, to no avail. But I’m all up ons with the matzah thing.

Here’s what you do.

• 2c flour
• 1/2ts salt
• 1/2c olive oil. Use something good. I like Star, but we just went through a bottle of extraordinary yumminess that I can’t remember the name of.
• 1/3c water

1. Preheat oven to 350°F
2. Start your timer. This has to be in the oven in under 18 minutes or it’s no good for Pesach. 18 is the gemmatria for “Chai”, which means “life”, so it’s “alive” in 18 minutes, and that means it’s leavened.
3. Don’t sweat the time. This takes like 5 minutes.
4. Combine the flour and salt.
5. Sprinkle in the oil while tumbling around the flour. See if you can get all the flour stuck into oily, crumbly chunks.
6. Sprinkle in the water while turning over the flour/oil mixture as little as possible. Don’t knead it. That’s the key. Just get it mixed so everything’s damp with oil or water.
7. Oil up some baking sheets.
8. Roll it out just as flat as you can get it, ideally 2mm thick or so. I rolled it out on my baking sheets so I knew it would fit, but it was a little awkward because of our rolling pin’s shape.
9. Bake for 25 minutes.
10. While it’s baking, clean up the flour so you don’t have chametz floating around the kitchen. Also, it’s a mess.

The result is much like a pie crust. It’s awesome with meats and I want to try it as sort of an eggs-and-biscuits thing, too. When I did it, it was just as good the next day. There wasn’t any to test on day 3.

I checked with our favorite rabbi to ask about it’s KFPness, and he said he couldn’t think of any reason it wouldn’t be OK, though seder matzah has to be just flour and water. Since I was baking this so we could eat dinner (all the grocery stores being totally sold out of matzah), rather than as a ritual object, he figures it’s fine, since people fry matzah all the time.