Something's Amiss

Why buy awful-tasting matzah when you can make some on your own?

I felt like contributing to the cooking today, so my brother and I first helped my grandmother make matzah-balls. They are one of my favorite things ever. She used to send me back to school with them and I would hoard them in the fridge, carefully eating them until just before they would have gone bad from the ptomaine.

I had never really thought about what was in them, but it's really not complicated.

When that was done, I decided to try making matzah of my own. Now, I really hate the stuff. It's tasteless, crumbly, and reminds me of itself, which is recursively unpleasant. I figured I could cheat a little by adding just a touch of salt and some apple juice to the usual flour and water. It came out like a very hard cracker, but wasn't bad at all. I wish I had done them at a higher temperature for crispness and rolled them a bit thinner, but it was tolerable, and for me an improvement over the traditional stuff, even if it did break the rules a little.

This brings me to the rules. The story says that when the Jews left Egypt, they were in such a hurry that they didn't have time to bake their bread. They carried the dough on their backs and as they wandered in the heat, the sub baked it into flat, unleavened bread - matzah.

I'm calling bullshit. This story bugs the hell out of me and I'm going to figure out the truth of it. I can let the lack of salt and other flavoring slide, since it might have been hard to come by for all I know. I'm pretty sure thought, that the ancient jews didn't have jars of fleischman's yeast sitting around that they just didn't get around to adding to their dough. They would likely have been using a starter to make their bread, and the starter would have had live yeast in it, and a good bit of leavening before they even mixed the dough.

It would take a long time, even in the desert for a loaf of bread to actually bake on your back, and I'm not convinced yet that it's even possible. If it is possible, then in that time, *some* leavening would have taken place.

This is really irritating me, and I'm pretty sure that rabbinic/talmudic Judaism is to blame. I'll get back to you when I sort it out.

Oh, I also made lemon curd, which was delicious.