Another flavour of matzoh crunch coming at you today. We were gifted a box of round matzoh, and I wanted to create something special with them.
After the caramel coating, I topped these with a layer of bittersweet chocolate and a swirl of white chocolate.
I topped that with these gorgeous slivered green pistachios, crumbled freeze dried raspberries and tart dried cherries. A sprinkling of flaky sea salt balanced out all the flavours. This is a beautiful and sophisticated flavour profile sure to please.
This sweet & salty matzoh crunch is delicious and utterly addictive, as my husband and chief recipe taster discovered this week.
Montreal baker and cookbook author Marcy Goldman is the originator of Matzoh Crunch. The recipe is published in her first cookbook, “A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking”. Matzoh crunch is essentially a layer of matzoh covered in brown sugar-butter caramel and topped with a blanket of melted dark chocolate.
This is my adaptation of her recipe. I have elevated matzoh crunch to the next level, by sprinkling on salted toasted almonds, Passover pretzel thins and toasted coconut flakes. I used a total of 4 different kinds of chocolate for this over the top confection. A base of milk chocolate, and then decorative swirls of white, blonde and bittersweet chocolate. It’s fancy AF.
Watch the video to see how it all comes together.
As with anything you bake, if you start with top quality ingredients, you will yield a better outcome. Most recipes I have seen for matzoh crunch call for melted chocolate chips as the top layer. The problem is that chocolate chips are not formulated to melt smoothly. They contain less cocoa butter so that they hold their shape. This is great for chocolate chip cookies, but not so great when you want a velvety smooth coating. So start with a good quality chocolate that is meant for melting. I love Valrhona. I order it online from Vanilla Food Company.
Blonde chocolate, is a more recent addition to the chocolate family. It is essentially caramelized white chocolate. You could make your own, or buy Valrhona’s which is marketed under “Dulcey“. This is not a Valrhona sponsored post, I just really love their chocolate!
Happy third night of Chanukah. I really did mean to get this posted last week, but time got away from me. But, luckily Chanukah lasts for 8 nights, so you still have 5 nights left to try these latkes.
When I mentioned to my family that I would be adding cheddar cheese to the latkes this year, it was met with less than enthusiasm. I get it. We really only get to eat latkes once a year, and folks don’t want you messing with tradition.
My husband, ever the diplomat, responded to my announcement with “I’m not really sure how I feel about that.” This coming from a guy that puts ketchup on his latkes (I think it’s an Ottawa thing). My daughter suggested that perhaps I “make two batches, one with cheddar and one without”. Spoken with the innocence of youth, who isn’t peeling and grating the potatoes, squeezing all the liquid out and getting the smell of fried oil in her house and hair for days, as well as trying to film a video!
But hear me out on this one. You know when you make a grilled cheese sandwich and those rogue bits of cheese escape and get all brown and crispy at the edges of the sandwich. That’s the best part, right? So imagine crispy fried potatoes and crispy cheese. Two kinds of crispy. How bad could that be? Pretty damn fantastic. They were met with rave reviews.
The inspiration came from Chef Michael Solmonov. I saw him add cheddar to his latkes on the Rachael Ray show last week, and I was sold. He added a full pound of cheddar to his latkes, but I scaled that back to 5 ounces in my version, which still let the potato flavour come through strong.
A few tips for success:
Do not skip the step in the recipe where you squeeze all the water out of the grated potatoes and onions. You will not achieve crispy latkes.
Save the liquid you squeeze from the potatoes and onions. Let it sit for a few minutes and then pour off the liquid. The gunk you see at the bottom of the bowl is potato starch. Mix it with the eggs and add it to your potato mixture. That potato starch is a magic ingredient in keeping your latkes from falling apart.
Reheat latkes on a wire rack, set over a baking sheet. The wire rack allows the air to circulate so the bottom of your latkes don’t get soggy.
Watch what happens when challah and babka collide.
On Rosh Hashanah, it’s traditional to dip apples in honey, to symbolize our desire for a sweet year ahead. In my quest to be efficient and practical, I thought it would be clever to bake my honey and apples right into the challah.
Adding apples to challah dough is tricky. Raw apples would leach too much moisture into the dough and make the challah soggy. Sautéing them first, solved that problem. To further boost the apple flavour, I spread some apple butter onto the dough. Apple butter does not actually contain any butter. It is made by cooking down apples into a very concentrated state. it’s quite tart, as no sugar is added to it.
I sprinkled my dough with golden raisins, but I know how contoversial raisins are, so leave them out if you have a family of raisin haters.
While a babka is traditionally baked in a loaf pan, on Rosh Hashanah, challah is round, a circle without an end, to symbolize our wish for a year in which life and blessings continue without end. So once the dough is twisted, just coil it into a knot.
I consider Honey Cake to be the Jewish equivalent to Fruit Cake. It’s always served at Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) celebrations but no one really likes it.
Honey figures prominently in Rosh Hashanah menus as it symbolizes our desire for a sweet new year. The choice of honey was brilliantly explained on the website torah.org with this insight: “A bee can inflict pain by its sting, yet it also produces delicious honey. Life has this same duality of potential. We pray that our choices will result in a sweet year.”
But nowhere is it written that honey must be baked into a cake. This year, Salted Honey Gingerbread ice Cream Sandwiches are on the menu. I’m a rebel.
Watch how they come together.
The cookie stamps I used are from Nordic Ware. Rolling the cookie dough in granulated sugar prevents the cookie from sticking to the cookie mold. You could certainly just bake the cookies without the bee themed stamps, but I couldn’t resist.
I tested out this recipe this summer and I wrapped each ice cream sandwich individually in plastic wrap and stored them in the freezer. We quickly discovered that the frozen cookies become rock hard making the sandwiches really difficult to eat. So in the recipe, I suggest you cut out the ice cream circles and store them a baking sheet wrapped in plastic wrap in the freezer. Assemble the sandwiches, with the room temperature, soft and chewy cookies, just before you want to eat them.
The addition of the salt to the honey ice cream keeps it from being cloyingly sweet. The spicy chewy ginger cookies are a perfect match for the sweet honey ice cream. Wishing you all a sweet and healthy new year.
I have been blogging since May 19 2009. This year will be the 13th Chanukah post I will be writing. If your family is anything like mine, they want the same classic potato latkes every year. Your idea of the ultimate latke very much depends on what you grew up with.
It’s beginning to smell and sound a lot like Chanukah around here as I test latke recipes. Check out the video.
My childhood memory of latkes is bittersweet. My mom made the most delicious latkes. Thin, lacy and very crispy at the edges, they were held together with the bare minimum of egg and matzoh meal. She served them with apple sauce and sour cream. That’s the sweet part of my childhood memory. The bitter part is related to my mom’s very keen sense of smell. She was offended by the lingering scent of frying oil. Almost immediately after making latkes, she would perform an exorcism to cleanse the house of the offending odour. She used her secret blend of cleaning agents, a potent, lethal combination of Joy and Ajax. Do not try this at home unless you are wearing a gas mask.
My husband, on the other hand, grew up with thick and creamy latkes. The potatoes were chopped quite fine and then fried, almost like a potato cake. They were served with ketchup. 😱 For a few years I made compromise latkes. Eventually, I won him over to the thin and lacy style. but he still eats them with ketchup.
As a blogger, I feel pressured to present something new and innovative every year. But the truth is, while my family smiled and nodded politely when I presented them with Sweet Potato and Brussels Sprouts Latkes one year, they just want traditional latkes.
A while ago, I came across a recipe for Apple-Potato Latkes with Cinnamon Sour Cream, from Melissa Clarke. I was intrigued with the addition of apples. We always eat latkes with applesauce, so adding apples to the batter wasn’t such a radical idea. While they were delicious, they strayed too far from my ideal latke. She added 3 eggs and 2/3 cup of flour to the batter. They held together beautifully, but they were too eggy and cake-like for me.
I played around with the ratios and came up with a more traditional latke. The apple remained as a subtle hum in the background, but the predominant flavour is potato. The key to making latkes is muscle power. You need to rid the potatoes, and apples in this case, of all their excess moisture. About 80% of a potato is water. Apples contain 85% water. After shredding, gather up the mixture into a tea towel and squeeze out as much liquid as you can. Save the liquid that the apples and potatoes give up. After sitting for a few minutes, all the starch from the potato liquid will settle to the bottom of the bowl. Drain off the liquid, and scrape that potato starch into the shredded mixture. It really helps keep the latkes together.
These latkes offer a slight variation on the classic latke, that even the die-hard traditionalists in your house will approve.
Pro tip: for pretty pink applesauce, don’t peel your apples. Just quarter them and put them in a pot with a little water. Cover and cook over low heat until tender. Use a food mill to get rid of the skins and core. Flavour with a pinch of cinnamon if desired.
Sam Sifton, food editor of the New York Times, has an interesting theory regarding pizza. The first slice of pizza a child sees and tastes becomes, for him, pizza. In effect, that becomes your standard by which you judge all other pizzas. I believe the same could be said for hamentashen. We have a predisposed love of the hamentashen we grew up with.
I grew up in Toronto, and in our family Purim was celebrated with hamantashen from Open Window Bakery. They were huge with a hard, crumbly cookie dough exterior and either a prune or poppy-seed filling. My sisters and I fought over the poppy-seed ones. (Mom, why did you even bother buying the prune ones?)
Where I get a bit cranky is when people start playing around with the dough that encases the filling. Many of the newer recipes include cream cheese or sour cream, in an attempt to make a flaky dough. People, we are making hamentashen here, not rugelach. Cream cheese and sour cream do not belong in hamentashen dough. The shell of a hamentashen should be cookie-like, firm and crumbly with a toothsome chew.
I did stray slightly by sprinkling a little bit of freeze-dried strawberry powder over my dough, as I was rolling it out. It added a hint of strawberry flavour to the dough, and looked so pretty. Sadly, the streaks disappeared upon baking, but the flavour was there. It’s an optional step.
I’m going to ask you to make your own strawberry rhubarb jam. Store-bought is fine, but if you have an extra 20 minutes, this jam is stellar. I discovered this recipe from Jake Cohen over at thefeedfeed. Sweet and tart with a little pop of acidity from rice wine vinegar, you will find yourself putting this s##t on everything.
Once the jam is made, the process goes fairly quickly, unless you have a mailing list of 25 to send hamentashen to!
Last night marked the first night of Passover. Traditionally, Jewish families, the world over, gather to retell the story of the Exodus of the Jewish people from slavery in. Egypt. When my son was little, he used to complain about having to go to the Seder. He’d say, “It’s so boring. Every year we tell the same story.” Which made my husband and I laugh, because, of course, that’s the whole point! We do this to link our past to our future, to teach the next generation. Never has the story of freedom been more relevant as now, when we await our own exodus from isolation back to freedom.
This story begins with the youngest person at the table asking the Four Questions (Mah Nishtanah). These four questions help to explain why this night is different from all other nights. This year, of course, this night is very different from all other years, because of Covid-19. In our family, we normally get together with my husband’s side on the first night, and my family on the second night. We both have huge families. I have 4 sisters and a brother and my husband has the opposite, 4 brothers and a sister. Our kids have 24 first cousins!
The Jewish people are an innovative tribe. Google, Waze, vaccines for polio, cholera and the bubonic plague, to mention but a few, were all created by Jews. During this time of social isolation, we innovate again and created a virtual Seder on Zoom.
Because we were’t able to be physically together, I mailed care packages of Passover desserts to my mom and siblings. Even in isolation, baking brings us closer together, and it has played a big part in alleviating my anxiety. This year I made marble matzoh crunch, milk chocolate almond matzoh crunch, PB&J macarons and coconut macaroons. When the lady at the post office asked the value of the packages, for insurance purposes, I almost said, priceless, because is there anything more special than receiving a box of treats in the mail?
I tried a new macaroon recipe this year. It was so good I had to share! The recipe comes from Danielle Kartes’ book Rustic Joyful Food. Food52.com posted them on Instagram and I was intrigued. They contain ingredients I have never used in coconut macaroons before.
A classic macaroon calls for mixing together egg whites, sweetened shredded coconut, sugar and vanilla. Danielle’s recipe omits the sugar and uses sweetened condensed milk. That really helps to make the macaroons moister and chewier in the centre. She uses the whole egg, not just the white,. The yolk adds richness and fat, helping to keep the macaroon from becoming crumbly and dry. She further enhances the flavour and texture by adding a stick of melted butter. The butter browns and caramelizes as it bakes, creating a rich and satisfying macaroon.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I am quite passionate about coconut. Thanks Danielle for upping my macaroon game to a new level. I’m very excited about these.
Purim begins this week at sundown on Monday March 9. For those not familiar with this Jewish holiday, I present to you a basic primer, my version of Purim 101. Essentially, the Festival of Purim commemorates a time when the Jewish people living in ancient Persia were saved from extermination. As in every good story, you have your heroes and your villans.
The heroes of the story are Esther, a beautiful young Jewish woman living in Persia (now known as Iran), and her cousin Mordecai, who raised her as if she were his daughter. Esther was taken to the house of Achashveirosh, King of Persia, to become part of his harem. King Achashveirosh loved Esther more than his other concubines, and made Esther his queen. Like all intelligent wives, she kept a thing or two about herself hidden from her husband. Upon advice from her cousin Mordecai, she kept her Jewish identity a secret from the King.
Our story’s villan is Haman, a rather arrogant, egotistical advisor to the King. The King appointed Haman as his Prime Minister. Haman had a particular hate-on for Mordecai because Mordecai refused to bow down before Haman every time he passed by. Rather than seeking to destroy Mordecai alone for this slight, Haman decided to take revenge on the entire Jewish population living in the Persian empire. The King gave Haman permission to do as he pleased. Haman’s plan was to exterminate all of the Jews.
Nothing got past Queen Esther. She had her finger on the pulse on the kingdom. Somehow she overheard this plot to annihilate all the Jews. She consulted her cousin Mordecai and he persuaded Esther to speak to the king on behalf of the Jewish people. This was a dangerous thing for Esther to do, because anyone who came into the king’s presence without being summoned could be put to death, and she had not been summoned. She told him of Haman’s plot against her people and somehow convinced him to save the Jewish people. We’re never told exactly how she convinced him, but there are rumours! The Jewish people were saved, and Haman and his ten sons were hanged on the gallows that had been prepared for Mordecai.
The holiday of Purim focuses on the pleasures of food and drink, more than any other Jewish holiday. It is a time for celebrating and letting go. In fact, traditional Jewish learning requires a person to drink until he cannot tell the difference between “cursed be Haman” and “blessed be Mordecai,” though opinions differ as to exactly how drunk that is. The traditional Purim treat is a little triangular cookie typically filled with a fruit or poppy-seed filling. The shape supposedly represents Haman’s three-cornered hat.
When I was a child, I didn’t know anyone who baked homemade hamentashen. They were always bought at Open Window Bakery in Toronto. There were 2 filling options, prune or poppyseed. Much like the New York vs. Montreal style bagel debate, a prune vs. poppyseed debate can also get quite ugly. Our family liked the prune ones better. I never really liked the texture or flavour of a poppyseed filling. But I do love a poppyseed cookie!
The hamentashen of choice in my husband’s family are my Aunt Carol’s Hamentashen, I always make a big batch of those, but every year I challenge myself to come up a new flavour. I wondered what would happen if I put poppyseed in the dough? I started with the very delicious butter dough from Jake Cohen at the feedfeed and added a heaping tablespoon of poppyseeds.
I have recently become enamoured with this fig jam (it’s killer on a cheese plate), and figured it would make a wonderful pairing with the poppyseed dough.
If you’re a Hamentashen novice, here are a few tips for success:
Roll dough between 2 sheets of parchment paper and chill before cutting into circles
Don’t overfill with jam. You will regret it when they burst open on the oven.
Brush edges of dough with beaten egg. it acts as an effective glue to hold them together.
Pinch edges and corners really well when shaping.
Freeze formed hamentashen for about 10 minutes before baking. They will hold their shape better.
Brush unbaked hamentashen with beaten egg white for some shine.
While they were quite delicious plain, I wanted to add an additional layer of texture, so I dipped one side in honey and then into toasted chopped walnuts. The bitterness of the walnuts plays so nicely with the sweetness of the fig jam. Plus, it looks so pretty.
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is just a few weeks away. It’s traditional to dip apples in honey, to symbolize our desire for a sweet year ahead. In my desire to be efficient and practical, I thought it would be a brilliant idea to bake my honey and apples right into the challah. I have been hard at work the past two weeks, figuring out just how to achieve that.
My starting point was my favourite challah dough. On Rosh Hashanah, challah is round, a circle without an end, to symbolize our wish for a year in which life and blessings continue without end. I was inspired by cloudykitchen’s Mixed Nut and Dulce de Leche Brioche Knot. Her clever twisting method was perfect for Rosh Hashanah.
After baking 5 versions of apple and honey challah, I believe I have nailed it. My husband, my chiropractor and my UPS man were happy to eat my experiments. None were a total fail, but there were a few issues along the way. The first hurdle to overcome was how to add the apples. Raw apples leached too much moisture into the challah, and made for a soggy bread. Sauteeing them first, solved that problem.
The apple flavour was kind of muted in the finished bread. In order to amp up the apple volume, I spread the dough with a thin layer of apple butter. Apple butter is simply very concentrated applesauce. There is actually no butter in it, only apples. It’s tangy and really packs a wallop of flavour. Some brown sugar, cinnamon and golden raisins provided a perfect counterpoint for all that zingy apple flavour.
Check out my video to see how it all came together.
https://youtu.be/KY80IAQMm14
Any leftover bread makes amazing toast the next morning. It’s a perfect way to segue gently from summer into fall. I’m not quite ready for pumpkin, but I will happily embrace apples in any form.
